Reaching for the stars: instead of counting smart bombs, perhaps we should count smart scientists

Natural History, April, 2003 by Neil deGrasse Tyson

In the months since the space shuttle Columbia's fatal reentry through Earth's atmosphere, it seems that everyone has become a NASA critic. After the initial shock and mourning, no end of journalists, politicians, scientists, engineers, policy analysts, and ordinary taxpayers began to debate the past, present, and future of America's presence in space. Although I have always been interested in this subject, my recent tour of duty with the President's Commission on the Future of the U.S. Aerospace Industry has further sharpened my senses and sensitivities.

Amid the occasional new arguments on the op-ed pages and TV talk shows were questions that get rolled out with every new woe in the space program: Why send people into space instead of robots? Why spend money in space when we need it here on Earth? How can we get people excited about the space program again?

Yes, excitement levels are low. But lack of enthusiasm is not apathy. In this case, the business-as-usual attitude shows that space exploration has passed seamlessly into everyday culture, so most Americans no longer even notice it. We pay attention only when something goes wrong.

In the 1960s, by contrast, space was an exotic frontier--traversed by the few, the brave, and the lucky. Every gesture NASA made toward the heavens caused a splash in the media--the surest evidence that space was still unfamiliar territory.

For many, particularly for NASA aficionados and all of the people engaged in the aerospace industry, the 1960s was the golden era of American space exploration. A series of space missions, each more ambitious than the one before, led to six lunar landings. We walked on the Moon, just as we said we would. Surely Mars was next. Those adventures sparked an unprecedented level of public interest in science and engineering, pumping eager, inspired students through the entire U.S. educational pipeline. What followed was a domestic boom in technology that would shape our lives for the rest of the century.

A beautiful story. But let's not fool ourselves into thinking we went to the Moon because we're pioneers or explorers or selfless discoverers. We went to the Moon because Cold War politics made it the militarily expedient thing to do.

In 1961, just weeks after the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit Earth, President John E Kennedy told Congress:

I believe 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.

But most people have forgotten the rest of his speech. Kennedy never suggested the Moon landing be accomplished for its own sake. He was issuing a powerful appeal to vanquish Communism:

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.

Clearly the president knew that although bravery may win battles, science and technology can win wars. And Kennedy was hardly the first leader to call for an expensive military program.

But what about discovery for its own sake? Are the scientific returns on a manned mission to Mars inherently important enough to justify its costs? After all, any foreseeable mission to Mars will be long and immensely expensive. But the United States is a wealthy nation. It has the money. And the technology is imaginable. Those aren't the issues.

Expensive projects are vulnerable because they take a long time and must be sustained across changeovers in political leadership as well as through downturns in the economy. Photographs of homeless children and unemployed factory workers juxtaposed with images of astronauts frolicking on Mars make a powerful case against the continued funding of space missions.

A review of history's most ambitious projects--the ones that have garnered an uncommonly large fraction of a nation's gross domestic product--demonstrates that only three goals have won such support: defense (the Great Wall of China); the promise of economic return (the voyages of Columbus and Magellan); and the praise of power (the pyramids of Egypt). And for expensive projects that fulfill more than one of these functions, money flows like beer from a freshly tapped keg. The 44,000 miles of U.S. interstate expressways make a crisp example. Conceived in the Eisenhower era to move materiel and personnel for the defense of the nation, that network is also heavily used by commercial vehicles. That's why there is always money for roads.

In the current space program the empirical risk of death remains high. With two lost shuttles out of 113 launches, an astronaut's chances of not coming home are about 2 percent. If your chances of death were 2 percent every time you drove to the Piggly Wiggly, you would never drive your car. To the Columbia crew, however, the return was worth that risk.