| Tomorrow, of course, is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and the first visit by man to the moon. Tom Wolfe - author of the highly recommended book on the space program, "The Right Stuff" - today penned an op-ed for the NYTimes explaining why the moon landing meant an end to the attention and money lavished on NASA and the US space program, and advocating for a renewed interest in space exploration.
For the basis for this advocacy, Wolfe paraphrases NASA scientist Wernher von Braun:
It's been a long time, but I remember him saying something like this: Here on Earth we live on a planet that is in orbit around the Sun. The Sun itself is a star that is on fire and will someday burn up, leaving our solar system uninhabitable. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of.
"What NASA needs now is the power of the Word," writes Wolfe. "But that['s] something NASA's engineers [have] no specifications for. At this moment, that remains the only solution to recovering NASA's true destiny, which is, of course, to build that bridge to the stars."
Expect a lot of this in the coming days as we celebrate the moon landings. Frankly I find this kind of romantic hyperbole kind of silly. NASA's promises of manned space flight to Mars or building a base on the moon seem to me a folly, a colossal waste of resources expended to achieve little or no scientific value. Gregg Easterbrook on a moon base:
...the idea of a permanent, crewed moon base nevertheless takes the cake for preposterousness. Although, of course, the base could yield a great discovery, its scientific value is likely to be small while its price is extremely high. Worse, moon-base nonsense may for decades divert NASA resources from the agency's legitimate missions, draining funding from real needs in order to construct human history's silliest white elephant.
And on NASA's 2007 budget, Easterbrook wrote:
At this point, the shuttle exists almost solely to service the space station, while the station exists almost solely to give the space shuttle a destination to fly to. Two space shuttles have exploded on national television. Yet the program drags on owing to the desire of aerospace contractors, and members of Congress who represent shuttle districts, for launches that cost nearly $1 billion each.
NASA has never really recovered from its top-dog status during the space-race years, and ever since has tried to milk Wolfe-ian romantic longing for travel to the stars to win priorities for its missions and bulk up its budget instead of concentrating on worthy and crucial scientific study. You could almost argue that NASA exists to win funding for itself.
Amusingly enough, NASA essentially agreed with Easterbrook's points in an open letter to the author. NASA is a showboat enterprise, suggesting manned missions to win public notice and interest? Well...sure!:
The American public...believes that human space exploration should be at the heart of NASA's efforts. That finding is consistent in poll after poll for the past forty years. No matter how much you disagree with your fellow citizens who foot the bill (and you have been disagreeing with them for many years), your opinion is in the minority.
"Scientific inquiry" as the result of a popularity contest. With this reasoning, NASA should forget manned missions to Mars and look into developing robot sex slaves.
As for the purpose of a lunar base? It's self evident!
Now, let's take a deeper look at NASA's stated priorities, particularly with regard to the new lunar exploration program, which you disparage with rather dismissive language. Rather than taking your playful interpretation, we'll quote NASA directly, which recently spent much time and effort thinking this through.
The stated themes of NASA's lunar exploration program are: human civilization,scientific knowledge, exploration preparation, global partnerships, economic expansion, and public engagement. While we can quibble on the margins, we believe this is a good foundation to build a space program on, and we think most Americans agree.
That's right, they can't come up with a single reason for a lunar base.
Don't get me wrong, I love Star Trek just as much as the next basement-dwelling, dirty hippie blogger. But it's...you know...fiction. And while von Braun's wistful gaze on faraway star systems is romantic, the implosion of the sun is still billions of years away, so there's still time to build a bridge to the stars, should we survive our immediate environmental crises. And it's also somewhat poignant that this interstellar fantasy was cooked up by an ex-Nazi: forget the lust for Lebensraum, think about the irony of a scientist responsible for the German V-1 project celebrating humanity as "the only meaningful life." I mean, we probably should get our sh*t together before we start shooting ourselves into far-flung galaxies, right? |
