Did You Miss It?
A ray of sunshine in the storm.
Last week I wrote about the upcoming launch of the NASA-SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo 2. Still, you might have missed it amid the continuing COVID-19 pandemic or the civil unrest unfolding after the wrongful death of George Floyd. Even President Trump, present at the Kennedy Space Center to witness the launch when it finally took place on May 30th, spent the first eight minutes of his subsequent remarks speaking about the unrest.
You may have dismissed this successful first launch of Americans on an American spacecraft from American soil in almost nine years, and its arrival at the International Space Station (ISS). What’s one more rocket launch?
Cooped up at home for the past few months, perhaps deprived of income, you may have worried about the pummeled economy and its effects. Maybe you were beginning to get out again, only to be impeded by curfews imposed because of the looting and vandalism amid legitimate peaceful protests over injustice in our society. Maybe you even started thinking again about climate change (remember that?), or some other real or perceived crisis.
Who but space enthusiasts care about lofting two more astronauts to whiz around Earth every ninety minutes on a $100 billion space station that costs $3-$4 billion annually to operate and maintain?
Why care about robots and humans exploring the Moon, Mars, and the rest of the Solar System when people are losing their lives, livelihood, patience, and even hope here on Earth? Why should average citezens be content with space enthusiasts spending taxpayer dollars to fund out of this world experiments often requiring vast sums better spent on Earth? None of that will help them or their children, right now, today?
I mean, we’ve got serious problems down here, from the pandemic and social injustice to political polarization, anthropogenic climate change, global terrorism, economic worries, and more.
Why not put all that money we’re spending on space to better use here on the ground instead, to solve Earthly problems? Sounds good, right?
There are several problems with this impossibly utopian dream, noble as it sounds.
First, the amount spent on space pales compared to that already spent on addressing other societal problems. For example, NASA’s budget is less than a half percent of the entire federal budget.
And every penny of that money is spent on Earth. Not just to buy the materials to build rockets and spacecraft and pay the engineers, scientists, and military personnel who design and operate them. To pay the administrators who organize and manage their organizations. To pay the janitors who maintain their offices and laboratories, the food servers who run their cafeterias. To pay the bankers and financial advisors who handle the money they earn for doing all these things. And so on down the line. We have not spent a single penny ON space IN space.
It is also evident that our social ills or flaws have been part of us for thousands of years of human history. That is likely to continue, which hard to hear for some, but is not to say we should give up trying to make things better.
For the relatively small amount spent on space, we get tremendous benefits, both direct and indirect. Direct benefits include ubiquitous global communications, GPS satellites for precise location services and timing that underpins our financial infrastructure, meteorology and climate science to forecast hurricanes and address climate change, national security satellites to protect us, and knowledge from astronomy and Earth sciences satellites. Indirectly, we benefit from the addition of new technologies in our daily lives that we might otherwise never develop, such as in medicine, materials, food science, and agriculture. Many of these direct and indirect benefits already help to address societal problems.
For a beautiful and still relevant explanation of all this, see the 1970 letter to a nun in Africa penned by then Marshall Space Flight Center Associate Director for Science Ernst Stuhlinger (and thanks to historian and author Roger Launius for posting it).
What, you ask, does all this have to do with the Demo 2 mission now continuing aboard the ISS?
First, let’s just admit the disgraceful situation in which the United States — the first nation to set foot upon the Moon a half-century ago — has been incapable of launching people into space and to the ISS for the last nine years. We’ve relied instead on Russian Soyuz spacecraft, a fortunate route, but unseemly for arguably the leading spacefaring nation. The SpaceX Crew Dragon, and its Boeing Starliner and NASA-Lockheed Orion companions, are initial steps in re-establishing the domestic ability to get to space for the nation most likely to ensure the ideals of liberty, freedom, democracy, and the rule of law in space.
Beyond the geo-politics and associated ideological debate, and beyond the tangible or immediate benefits of space activities in general, programs like Commercial Crew and the Artemis Program to return humans to the Moon inspire. They provided the stimulation to try to do great things, much like the Apollo moon program inspired generations to become the engineers and scientists who invented much of the technology we enjoy today, or the way a single photograph from that program helped to inspire climate awareness that has only grown since.
Aspirational goals and achievements, perhaps impossible now but achievable one day, if we try, hold the potential to unite rather than divide us. We desperately need them. They can transcend both the tribal behavior we witness every day and the perceived limits of our terrestrial cradle. We need something more than the legitimate but never-ending struggle against disease, poverty and homelessness, repression and genocide, and violence.
Exploration, development, and ultimately the beneficial use of the vast resources available to us in space provide hope for a human condition beyond mere partisan, terrestrial myopia.
