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By Neil deGrasse Tyson
Why We Should Keep Reaching for the Stars
In 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama articulated his vision for the future of American space exploration, which included an eventual manned mission to Mars. Such an endeavor would surely cost hundreds of billions of dollars -- maybe even $1 trillion. Whatever the amount, it would be an expensive undertaking. In the past, only three motivations have led societies to spend that kind of capital on ambitious, speculative projects: the celebration of a divine or royal power, the search for profit, and war. Examples of praising power at great expense include the pyramids in Egypt, the vast terra-cotta army buried along with the first emperor of China, and the Taj Mahal in India. Seeking riches in the New World, the monarchs of Iberia funded the great voyages of Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan. And military incentives spurred the building of the Great Wall of China, which helped keep the Mongols at bay, and the
In 1957, the Soviet launch of the world's first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, spooked the United States into the space race. A year later, the
that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth." These were powerful words, and they galvanized the nation. But a more revealing passage came earlier in the speech, when Kennedy reflected on the challenge presented by the Soviets' space program: "If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take."
Kennedy's speech was not simply a call for advancement or achievement; it was a battle cry against communism. He might have simply said, "Let's go to the moon: what a marvelous place to explore!" But no one would have written the check. And at some point, somebody has got to write the check.
If the United States commits to the goal of reaching Mars, it will almost certainly do so in reaction to the progress of other nations -- as was the case with
The joke does not seem quite so funny anymore. Last December, China released an official strategy paper describing an ambitious five-year plan to advance its space capabilities. According to the paper, China intends to "launch space laboratories, manned spaceship and space freighters; make breakthroughs in and master space station key technologies, including astronauts' medium-term stay, regenerative life support and propellant refueling; conduct space applications to a certain extent and make technological preparations for the construction of space stations." A front-page headline in The
When it comes to its space programs, China is not in the habit of proffering grand but empty visions. Far from it: the country has an excellent track record of matching promises with achievements. During a 2002 visit to China as part of my service on a
China's latest space proclamations could conceivably produce another "Sputnik moment" for the United States, spurring the country into action after a relatively fallow period in its space efforts. But in addition to the country's morbid fiscal state, a new obstacle might stand in the way of a reaction as fervent and productive as that in Kennedy's era: the partisanship that now clouds space exploration.
THE POLITICS OF SPACE
For decades, space exploration stood above party politics. Support for
But beginning in 2004,
In February 2004, I was appointed by Bush to a nine-member commission whose mandate was to chart an affordable and sustainable course for implementing the new policy. The plan ultimately received bipartisan support in
Since Obama entered office, Republicans have taken to politicizing space exploration with no less verve. In a speech at the
Rather than celebrating Obama's ambitions, scores of protesters lined the causeways surrounding the
Ultimately, the fight over Obama's plan became all about jobs. The plan left a gap of uncertain length between the phasing out of the shuttle and new launches beyond low-Earth orbit, meaning that for some period of time, there would be no need for shuttle workers, especially the contractors who work with
This emphasis on jobs led the public debate into a rhetorical cul-de-sac, since few politicians can afford to defend any federal agency, much less
These constitute perfectly reasonable arguments in support of spending on space. Still, there was something disingenuous about Obama's rhetoric. The economic stimulus legislation proposed doubling the budgets of the
In his second State of the Union address, delivered in January 2011, Obama once again cited the space race as a catalyst for scientific and technological innovation. He then noted the hefty investments that other countries are now making in their technological future and the fact that the U.S. educational system is falling behind, declaring these disturbing imbalances to be this generation's Sputnik moment. He laid out four goals: to have a million electric vehicles on the road and to deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless Internet service to 98 percent of all Americans by 2015 and to derive 80 percent of U.S. electricity from clean energy and to provide 80 percent of Americans with access to high-speed rail by 2035.
Those are all laudable goals. But to think of that list as the future fruits of a contemporary Sputnik moment is dispiriting to proponents of space exploration. It reveals a change of vision over the decades, from dreams of tomorrow to dreams of technologies that should already exist.
There is also a deeper flaw in Obama's plan. In a democracy, a president who articulates a goal with a date of completion far beyond the end of his term cannot offer a guarantee of ever reaching that goal. Kennedy knew full well what he was doing in 1961 when he set out to land a man on the moon "before this decade is out." Had he lived and been elected to a second term, he would have been president through January 19, 1969. And had the 1967 Apollo 1 launch-pad fire that killed three astronauts not occurred, the Apollo program would not have been delayed and the United States would certainly have reached the moon under Kennedy's watch. Now, imagine if in 1961, Kennedy had instead called for achieving the goal "by sometime in the 1980s." With a mission statement like that, it is not clear whether American astronauts would have ever left Earth. But that is essentially what Obama has done by calling for a mission to Mars by the mid-2030s. When a president promises something beyond his years in office, he is fundamentally unaccountable. It is not his budget that must finish the job. Another president inherits the problem, and it becomes a ball too easily dropped, a plan too easily abandoned, a dream too readily deferred. So although the rhetoric of Obama's space speech was stirring and visionary, the politics of his speech were, empirically, a disaster. The only thing guaranteed to happen on his watch is the interruption of the United States' access to space.
THE LESSONS OF HUBBLE
The partisanship surrounding space exploration and the retrenching of U.S. space policy are part of a more general trend: the decline of science in the United States. As its interest in science wanes, the country loses ground to the rest of the industrialized world in every measure of technological proficiency. For example, in recent decades, the rate of U.S. submissions to peer-reviewed science journals has dropped or barely held steady, while the rates of submissions from Brazil, China, Japan, and western Europe have risen sharply. Data on graduate-level education tell a similar story. According to the latest available annual census by the
Until recently, most of those students came to the United States, earned their degrees, and gladly stayed for employment in the U.S. high-tech work force. Now, however, department chairs are anecdotally reporting that foreign nationals in their graduate programs are choosing to return home more frequently, owing to a combination of widespread anti-immigrant sentiment and increased professional opportunities in China, India, and eastern Europe -- the places whose citizens are the most highly represented in advanced academic science and engineering programs in the United States. This is not a brain drain, because the United States never laid claim to these students in the first place, but a kind of brain regression. Thus, what is bad for America is good for the world. In the next phase of this shift, the United States should expect to begin losing the talent that trains the talent, which would be a disaster. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, investments in science and technology have proved to be reliable engines of economic growth. If homegrown interest in those fields is not regenerated soon, the comfortable lifestyle to which Americans have become accustomed will draw to a rapid close.
Nevertheless, there are still reasons to be hopeful. One of the most popular museums in the world, with attendance levels rivaling those of the
Or consider the fate of the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble's scientific legacy is unimpeachable. Its data have been used in more published research papers than data from any other single scientific instrument, in any discipline. Among the highlights of Hubble's achievements is the way it helped settle a decades-old debate about the age of the known universe (now agreed to be about 14 billion years). Yet in 2004, when
Hubble is the first and only space telescope to observe the universe using primarily visible light. Its crisp, vibrant, and detailed images of the cosmos make it a kind of supreme version of human eyes in space. No matter what Hubble reveals -- planets, dense star fields, colorful interstellar nebulae, deadly black holes, gracefully colliding galaxies -- each image opens up a private vista of the cosmos. Hubble came of age in the 1990s, during the exponential growth in access to the Internet. Soon, Hubble images, each more magnificent than the last, became screen savers and desktop wallpaper on the computers of people who had never before found reason to celebrate, however quietly, Earth's place in the universe. Those gorgeous images made Americans feel that they were participants in cosmic discovery. And so, when the source of those images was threatened, there followed a torrent of letters to the editor, online comments, and phone calls to
Hubble offers another lesson about the value of space exploration. When it was launched in 1990, a flaw in the design of its optics system produced hopelessly blurry images, much to
PLANNING FOR TOMORROW
One cannot script those kinds of outcomes, yet similar serendipitous scenarios occur continually. The cross-pollination of disciplines almost always stimulates innovation. Clearly defined, goal-oriented support for specific outcomes in specific fields may yield evolutionary advances, but cross-pollination involving a diversity of sciences much more readily encourages revolutionary discoveries. And nothing spurs cross-pollination like space exploration, which draws from the ranks of astrophysicists, biologists, chemists, engineers, planetary geologists, and subspecialists in those fields. Without healthy federal support for the space program, ambitions calcify, and the economy that once thrived on a culture of innovation retreats from the world stage.
Other good reasons abound for supporting space science. Humans should search Mars and find out why liquid water no longer runs on its surface; something bad happened there, and it would be important to identify any signs of something similar happening on Earth. We should visit an asteroid and learn how to deflect it -- after all, if we discover one heading toward Earth, it would be rather embarrassing if big-brained, opposable-thumbed humans were to meet the same fate as the pea-brained dinosaurs. We should drill through the miles of ice on Jupiter's frozen moon Europa and explore the liquid ocean below for living organisms. We should visit Pluto and other icy bodies in the outer solar system, because they hold clues to the origin of our planet. And we should probe Venus' thick atmosphere to understand why the greenhouse effect has gone awry there, raising surface temperatures to 500 degrees Celsius. No part of the solar system should be beyond our reach, and no part of the universe should hide from our telescopes.
What the Bush plan and the Obama plan have in common, apart from having exposed partisan divides, is an absence of funding to bring their visions closer to the present, let alone an unspecified future. In the current economic and political climate, it might be difficult to imagine much support for a renewed commitment to space exploration -- even in the face of a direct challenge from China. Many will ask, "Why are we spending billion of dollars up there in space when we have pressing problems down here on Earth?" That question should be replaced by a more illuminating one: "As a fraction of one of my tax dollars today, what is the total cost of all U.S. spaceborne telescopes and planetary probes, the rovers on Mars, the International Space Station, the recently terminated space shuttle, telescopes yet to orbit, and missions yet to fly?" The answer is one-half of one penny. During the storied Apollo era, peak
Even in troubled economic times, the United States is a sufficiently wealthy nation to embrace an investment in its own future in a way that would drive the economy, the country's collective ambitions, and, above all, the dreams of coming generations. Imagine the excitement when
(AUTHOR BIO: Neil deGrasse Tyson is Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the
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