Waste of Space

Long before the launch of Sputnik in 1957, American defense analysts were preoccupied with the value of satellites as propaganda beacons in the sky, rather than with the practical benefits they might bring. “Considerable prestige … will accrue to the nation which is successful in launching the first satellite,” proclaimed a US Department of Defense paper in 1955. From this logic came a proposal to detonate an atom bomb on the lunar surface, purely for dramatic effect. Another starry-eyed strategist proposed crashing two rockets into the moon, one filled with blue powder, the other with red, thus redecorating the celestial body in American colors.

The same emphasis on propaganda pollutes today’s space policy.

In 2004, President George W Bush announced plans to return to the moon, as a prelude to a mission to Mars. The project, priced at $400 billion, was inspired primarily by the need to stay ahead of the Chinese in the new space race. Just as was the case in the 1960s, the ability to make shallow gestures in space is still assumed to be an indicator of a nation’s vitality.

Unfortunately, these enormously expensive missions inevitably mean that practical, earth-based science suffers, as does genuinely valuable satellite research. It’s no wonder that the most forceful and articulate opposition to the Apollo mission came from scientists who objected to the way their budgets were bled in order to fund an ego trip to the moon. The same complaints were heard after Bush’s Mars plans were announced.

Space enthusiasts are nevertheless always ready with justifications for spending taxpayers’ money. Most rely on the old adage: ‘Man must explore.’ This is perhaps true, but why must we go to worthless rocks in the sky in order to satisfy our need? Exploration need not involve physical movement, as any good scientist will attest. Surely there are plenty of frontiers worthy of exploration here on earth: hunger, poverty, peace.

A slightly more practical rationale for returning to the moon relates to an isotope called Helium-3. It might prove useful as a second generation fusion source and, as such, solve the earth’s clean energy needs. But the operative word is ‘might’. The technology has not yet been developed, and Helium-3 is scarce. The isotope exists in greater concentration on the moon’s surface than on earth, but ‘greater’ is relative. To extract one ton of Helium-3, around 200 million tons of lunar soil would have to be processed. That would require a massive strip mining facility on the Moon, complete with support facilities necessary to keep workers alive, all for an energy process which has not yet been shown to work.

Recently, Stephen Hawking has been arguing that we must colonize other planets in order to ensure the long-term survival of the human race. Much as I admire Hawking, that’s nonsense. The Earth is indeed doomed, but where precisely might refugees eventually go? The solar system certainly offers no habitable alternative.

And what of distant galaxies? Suppose a spacecraft capable of traveling one million miles per hour – or 20 times faster than Apollo - could be developed. In order to reach the nearest star system theoretically capable of harboring hospitable planets, that craft would take 4,000 years to reach its destination. In other words, at our current rate of development (or, rather, disintegration), we will have turned the Earth into a parched and smoking ruin long before we figure out the problems of reaching distant planets.

One final justification for manned space missions has been provided by Joan Johnson-Freese of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. She sees space travel as ‘soft-power’ – the sort of power that doesn’t hurt anyone but still makes a point. Returning to the moon, she feels, would constitute an assertion of cultural superiority. As evidence to support her contention, Johnson-Freese points to the worldwide admiration for the Apollo lunar landing in 1969. “Admiration and respect,” she argues, “can buy as much, if not more, security as a rifle can.”

This, quite frankly, is daft. Granted, a billion people watched Neil Armstrong’s small step, but quite a few of them then went back to fighting one another in Vietnam, Palestine, Biafra and Alabama. The excitement of the landing was indisputable, but it was also indisputably ephemeral. A year afterwards, even Armstrong was questioning whether it was indeed a “giant leap” for mankind. While the prospect of a Chinese astronaut walking on the moon might produce a brief flurry of excitement, another American doing so would meet with little enthusiasm.

In fact, a mission to Mars might produce precisely the opposite reaction Johnson-Freese predicts. It might suggest that the US is a shallow, egotistical country disengaged from world problems and intent on frivolous display. We need to remind ourselves that while Apollo was popular among white, middle class men, it was distinctly unpopular among blacks, women and the poor, who overwhelmingly disapproved of the expense.

Clearly, space spectaculars are not admired by the dispossessed, and the enemies of America count themselves in that group. And an expensive mission to the moon - especially at a time of global recession - will inevitably provoke condemnation by those crying out for money to be spent on global warming, starvation and drought.

Pointless gestures in space would add credence to fundamentalist allegations of American spiritual vacuity.

Not long after Armstrong landed on the moon, NASA proposed a trip to Mars. Richard Nixon, however, killed that idea. “We must realize,” he argued, “that space expenditures must take their proper place within a rigorous system of national priorities.” His budget office produced a devastating critique of manned space travel, pointing out that “[manned] missions … have little demonstrable economic or social return to atone for their high cost.” New York congressman Edward Koch put the argument in blunter terms: “I just can't for the life of me see voting for monies to find out whether or not there is some microbe on Mars, when in fact I know there are rats in Harlem apartments.”

The Obama administration, with its emphasis on all things new, has pledged a complete overhaul of government spending. We are told that funding of government projects will be submitted to a rigorous cost-benefit analysis, that ‘sacred’ projects will not receive money simply because they always have. Let us hope this prudence is applied to NASA.

So far, Obama has sent mixed signals. A year before the election, he said that an $18 billion hike in funding to education would be paid by cutting the moon mission. Then, three months later, he started courting NASA, perhaps out of a need to woo voters in Florida. By last August, he’d gone full circle: expressing full support for Bush’s pledge to put Americans back on the moon by 2020. For a man who got to the White House on a promise of change, that sounds depressingly familiar.

While it is not Obama’s habit to revere old Republicans, he would do well to study what Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower had to say about space. Nixon was the first president to recognize the NASA trick of using past expenditure to justify future investment. In other words, as NASA argues, a mission to Mars will make what was spent going to the Moon worthwhile. That is a clever way of endlessly spending money without ever producing anything. Eisenhower, who vetoed funding for Apollo, once reminded Americans that “every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

During a recent radio program on manned space travel, a NASA astronaut asked me how the American people might react if the next man on the moon was Chinese.

I replied that the question itself implied a worrying level of American insecurity which, applied to space, has dangerous and costly implications. I reminded him of something Eisenhower said in 1964. Bemoaning the vast resources wasted on a pointless race to the moon, he predicted that one day historians would judge that “here was where the US, like Rome, went wrong – here at the peak of its power and prosperity was when it forgot those ideals which made it great.”