From listening to space enthusiasts talk about space travel, or from watching blockbuster science fiction movies, you might think that sending people to the stars is inevitable and will happen soon. But, according to Neil deGrasse Tyson, author of the new book "Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier," America's space program is at a critical moment.
He believes it's time for America to invest heavily in space exploration and research. "Space exploration is a force of nature unto itself that no other force in society can rival," Tyson tells NPR's David Greene.
A line of reasoning among those who are unwittingly wishful might be, We invented flight when nobody thought it was possible. A mere sixty-five years later, we went to the Moon. It’s high time we journeyed among the stars. My rebuttal is borrowed from a legal disclaimer of the investment industry: Past performance is not an indicator of future returns.
What does it take to pry money and labor from a population to pay for major initiatives? A study of the world’s famously funded projects across time and place reveals three common drivers: praise of person or deity, economics, and war.
Some expensive investments in praise include the Great Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, and plush cathedrals. Some expensive projects launched in the hope of economic return include Columbus’s voyage to the new world, Magellan’s round-the-world voyage, and Marco Polo’s voyage to the Far East.
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Inspired in part by the successes of the Saturn V and the momentum of the Apollo program, visionaries of the day foretold a future that never came to be: space habitats, Moon bases, and Mars colonies up and running by the 1990s. But funding for the Saturn V evaporated as the Moon missions wound down.
Additional production runs were canceled, the manufacturers’ specialized machine tools were destroyed, and skilled personnel had to find work on other projects. What cultural forces froze the Saturn V rocket in time and space?
Saturn V, the largest, most powerful rocket ever flown.
The Role of Innovation and Funding
Human ingenuity seldom fails to improve on the fruits of human invention. In 2000 BC a pair of ice skates made of polished animal bone and leather thongs was a transportation breakthrough. In 1610 Galileo’s eight-power telescope was an astonishing tool of detection, capable of giving the senators of Venice a sneak peek at hostile ships before they could enter the lagoon.
In 1887 the one-horsepower Benz Patent Motorwagen was the first commercially produced car powered by an internal combustion engine. In 1946 the thirty-ton, showroom-size ENIAC, with its 18,000 vacuum tubes and 6,000 manual switches, pioneered electronic computing. Of course, such advances don’t just fall from the sky. Clever people think them up.
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Problem is, to turn a clever idea into reality, somebody has to write the check. And when market forces shift, those somebodies may lose interest and the checks may stop coming. If computer companies had stopped innovating in 1978, your desk might still sport a hundred-pound IBM 5110. If communications companies had stopped innovating in 1973, you might still be schlepping a two-pound, nine-inch-long cell phone. Sorry about that.
We haven’t surpassed the Saturn V. The largest, most powerful rocket ever flown by anybody, ever, the thirty-six-story-tall Saturn V was the first and only rocket to launch people from Earth to someplace else in the universe.
In all eras, across time and culture, only three drivers have fulfilled that funding requirement: war, greed, and the celebration of royal or religious power. The Great Wall of China; the pyramids of Egypt; the Gothic cathedrals of Europe; the US interstate highway system; the voyages of Columbus and Cook-nearly every major undertaking owes its existence to one or more of those three drivers.
Today, as the power of kings is supplanted by elected governments, and the power of religion is often expressed in non-architectural undertakings, that third driver has lost much of its sway, leaving war and greed to run the show. Sometimes those two drivers work hand in hand, as in the art of profiteering from the art of war.
Like it or not, war (cold or hot) is the most powerful funding driver in the public arsenal. When a country wages war, money flows like floodwaters. Lofty goals-such as curiosity, discovery, exploration, and science-can get you money for modest-size projects, provided they resonate with the political and cultural views of the moment.
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Doubt, Delirium, and the Future of Space Exploration
Soothsaying tends to come in two flavors: doubt and delirium. It was doubt that led skeptics to declare that the atom would never be split, the sound barrier would never be broken, and people would never want or need computers in their homes.
Richard van der Riet Woolley, the eleventh British Astronomer Royal, is the source of a particularly woolly remark. When he landed in London after a thirty-six-hour flight from Australia, some reporters asked him about space travel. It’s utter bilge, he answered.
That was in early 1956. In early 1957 Lee De Forest, a prolific American inventor who helped birth the age of electronics, declared, Man will never reach the moon, regardless of all future scientific advances. Remember what happened in late 1957? Not just one but two Soviet Sputniks entered Earth orbit.
The day the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, a chapter of science fiction became science fact, and the future became the present. All of a sudden, futurists went overboard with their enthusiasm. The delirium that technology would advance at lightning speed replaced the delusion that it would barely advance at all. Experts went from having much too little confidence in the pace of technology to having much too much.
Commentators became fond of twenty-year intervals, within which some previously inconceivable goal would supposedly be accomplished. On January 6, 1967, in a front-page story, The Wall Street Journal announced: The most ambitious US space endeavor in the years ahead will be the campaign to land men on neighboring Mars. Most experts estimate the task can be accomplished by 1985.
In The Book of Predictions, published in 1980, the rocket pioneer Robert C. Truax forecast that 50,000 people would be living and working in space by the year 2000. When that benchmark year arrived, people were indeed living and working in space. But the tally was not 50,000. It was three.
All those visionaries (and countless others) never really grasped the forces that drive technological progress. In Wilbur and Orville’s day, you could tinker your way into major engineering advances. Their first airplane did not require a grant from the National Science Foundation: they funded it through their bicycle business.
Space exploration unfolds on an entirely different scale. Notwithstanding the sanitized memories so many of us have of the Apollo era, Americans were not first on the Moon because we’re explorers by nature or because our country is committed to the pursuit of knowledge. We got to the Moon first because the United States was out to beat the Soviet Union, to win the Cold War any way we could.
Tyson sees this "force of nature" firsthand when he goes to student classrooms. "I could stand in front of eighth-graders and say, 'Who wants to be an aerospace engineer so you can design an airplane 20 percent more fuel-efficient than the one your parents flew?' " Tyson says. "That doesn't usually work. But if I say, 'Who wants to be an aerospace engineer to design the airplane that will navigate the rarefied atmosphere of Mars?' because that's where we're going next, I'm getting the best students in the class. I'm looking for life on Mars? I'm getting the best biologist. I want to study the rocks on Mars?
But spending for space programs isn't where Tyson would like it to be. "I think if you double [the budget], to a penny on the dollar, that's enough to take us in bold visions in a shorter time scale to Mars, visit asteroids, to study the status of all the planets," he says.
He also highlights the importance of understanding planetary phenomena to protect Earth. "Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct."
The asteroid Apophis poses a very slim chance of striking Earth in 2036.
The possibility of asteroids hitting Earth is actually a reasonably serious problem that does need a solution, Tyson contends. The asteroid Apophis, named for the Egyptian god of death and darkness, has a very slim chance of striking Earth in 2036.
Another option is what he calls a "gravitational tractor beam." A space probe would be parked a fixed distance away from the asteroid. Gravity would tend to pull the objects together, but by firing rockets on the probe, the asteroid would actually be "towed" away.
Tyson admits that such a space tow truck would be a tough sell for a president asking for more money for NASA.
The Vastness of Space
Space is vast and empty beyond all earthly measure. When Hollywood shows a starship cruising through the galaxy, they typically indicate this fact with points of light (stars) drifting past at a rate of one or two per second.
The Moon is far when compared with where you might go in a jet airplane, but it sits at the tip of our noses compared with anything else in the universe. If the Earth were the size of a basketball, the Moon would be the size of a softball some ten paces away-the farthest we have ever sent people into space.
On this scale, Mars (at its closest) is a mile away. Pluto is 100 miles away. Let’s assume money is no object. In this pretend-future, our noble quest to discover new places and uncover scientific truths has become as effective as war at drumming up funds.
If a spaceship managed to sustain Earth’s escape speed of seven miles per second, a trip to the nearest star would last a long-and-boring 100,000 years. Too long, you say? Energy increases as the square of your speed, if you want to double your speed you must invest four times as much energy. A tripling of your speed requires nine times as much energy.
Launched in 1976, it was clocked at nearly 42 miles per second (150,000 miles per hour) as it accelerated toward the Sun. What we really want is a spaceship that can travel near the speed of light. How about ninety-nine percent the speed of light?
All you would need is seven hundred million times the energy that thrust the Apollo astronauts on their way to the Moon. Actually, that’s what you would need if the universe were not described by Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
As predicted by Einstein, however, while your speed increases, so too does your mass, which forces you to spend even more energy than previously figured to accelerate your space ship near the speed of light.
No problem. These are very clever engineers. But now we learn that the nearest star that is known to have planets is not Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, but one that is about fifteen light years away. While traveling ninety-nine percent of the speed of light, Einstein’s special relativity shows that you will age at only ten percent the pace of everybody back on Earth, so the round trip for you will last not thirty years, but about three.
The distance to the Moon is ten-million times farther than the distance flown by the original Wright Flyer of the Wright brothers. But the Wright Brothers were two guys with a garage. Apollo 11, the first moon landing, was two guys with two hundred billion dollars and ten thousand scientists and engineers and the mandate of a beloved, assassinated president.
These are not comparable achievements. The cost and effort of space travel is a consequence of the fact that space is supremely hostile to life.
Robots vs. Humans in Space
Perhaps what we really need is a genetically engineered life form that can survive the stress of space and still conduct scientific experiments. Actually, such “life” forms have already been engineered. They are called robots.
You don’t have to feed them. They don’t need life support. And most important, they won’t get upset if you don’t bring them back. It’s probably true that no city has ever held a ticker-tape parade for a robot.
But it’s probably also true that no city has ever held a ticker-tape parade for an astronaut who was not the first to do something or go somewhere. Can you name the two Apollo 16 astronauts who walked on the Moon? Probably not.
It was the second-to-last moon mission. But I’d bet you have a favorite picture of the cosmos taken by the orbiting robot known as the Hubble Space Telescope. I’d bet you remember the images from the Mars robotic lander Pathfinder and its deployed rover Sojourner, which went “six-wheeling” across the Martian terrain.
In the absence of a few hundred billion dollars in travel money, and in the presence of the hostile cosmic conditions, what we need is not wishful thinking and science-fiction rhetoric inspired by a shallow reading of the history of exploration. What we need, and must wait for, is a breakthrough in our scientific understanding of the structure of the universe so that we might exploit such shortcuts through the space-time continuum as worm holes that connect one part of the cosmos to another.
After decades of global dominance, America's space shuttle program ended last summer while countries like Russia, China and India continue to advance their programs.
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"Not only does that get people interested in sciences and all the related fields, [but] it transforms the culture into one that values science and technology, and that's the culture that innovates," Tyson says. "And in the 21st century, innovations in science and technology are the foundations of tomorrow's economy."