Aight, so, today I was listening to these songs. Incidentally, anyone wanting to know this blog's completely official theme songs, ought to listen to those. I like "Our Place In The Cosmos", personally. However, as I hadn't checked the website in some time, I found a new one, the most recent one. (If you're in the future, that would be "The Case for Mars.") While, like most videos, "The Case for Mars" is uplifting, I also found it a bit depressing. Because in the current political and economic climate, it's a very lofty goal. To put it bluntly, manned spaceflight is easy to devalue in budgetary crisis. The Constellation program has been canceled, and Obama intends for NASA to rely on private vehicles for manned missions. Unfortunately, I have a hard time believing that a profit motive exists in traveling to Mars. The expenditure is huge, and the payoff for the initial flight is low. Many people do not mind this shift in priorities. Most people I talk to about the decline of the manned space program seem to believe that it is (was?) a waste of a money.
First, some prebuttal. The most common argument against spending money on manned spaceflight is that we could "spend it better here at home." Oh. Could we? Let me give you some appreciation of the scales involved. The U.S. Department of Defense has an annual budget of $651 billion . Note that this does not count the money spent on Iraq and Afghanistan, which has been funded through special appropriations rather than the standard budget. NASA, by comparison, has an annual budget of $17 billion. A modern F-35 fighter costs $191 million. The Mars Exploration Rover Mission, which carried the Spirit and Opportunity super-rovers (seriously, they could kick the Energizer bunny's ass) cost $820 million. We plan to buy 2,443 F-35s. If we settled for 2,440, what could we do with that? Now, I respect the military. Even as a humanist, I recognize that there are rare occasions when force, or the threat thereof, is a necessary component of a problem's solution. But am I the only one who thinks it's a bit odd that nobody bats an eye at such expenditures, yet spending a fraction of that on space is a "waste"?
Space spending provides real, tangible benefits. For a start, it poses an engineering challenge. Going into space requires that we learn to work in harsher in environments, with less weight and maximum self-sufficiency. All of these problems, once solved, can be applied to machines and people that work on Earth, reaping economic benefits from our improved technical prowess. This isn't simply hypothesis--it really happens. Fuel cells? Computerized machining? Early integrated circuits? Thank Apollo. I won't even begin to describe the purely scientific results we get from space exploration. Space also provides a great human resource by inspiring and encouraging interest in the fields of engineering and science. Large scale human spaceflight breeds a new generation of visionaries to gaze out at the universe and push the bounds of the possible.
Of course, now that I've said the words "push the bounds of the possible", I can segue into more abstract, idealistic reasons. As I touched on before, space exploration is for all mankind. A dollar spent for space exploration is a dollar representing greater cooperation and an achievement that is in many ways shared by the species. Can you say the same for your fighter jet? Space exploration is exploration. Humans are explorers. I must confess, I find it baffling that anyone can gaze up at the night sky, viewing in their fullest glory the moon, planets, and stars, and be content to say "Nah, let's sit this out." We, as a species, owe it to ourselves to seek out strange new worlds. Anything else is hopelessly self-limiting.
Colonization. There, I said it. It seems like most people discussing space are a little afraid of this topic. I know the feeling. Mentioning space colonization in serious debate often garners a patronizing glare. It's so omnipresent in science fiction that many seem to dismiss its plausibility. We need to talk about it, though. Again, we're human--do we expect to stay on this rock forever? As we expand, as our technical prowess grows, are we content to draw a sphere around our current location and say, "That's it"? I'm not. I suspect neither are many others. I firmly believe that there exists a human future in space, that one day people will be born off-planet. At least, off this planet. It is crazy, yes. But it is a good deal less crazy than being satisfied and content in stagnation.
Private space travel is A Good Thing. But corporations have little reason to travel to places that don't offer immediate economic benefit. Many of the perks I cite, such as inspiration and the development of engineering expertise, are public goods. A corporation has no real incentive to travel to Mars unless there's already something there, something demonstrated. Otherwise, you simply won't get investors. Ours could be an interplanetary civilization, but we must all help throw the first tendrils of human activity out to the stars. Private space travel will no doubt have its place in this endeavor, but it cannot ultimately be the solution in and of itself. All these worlds are ours--yes, even Europa. But first, we must be willing to provide Columbus with his ships.
I recall reading somewhere that the Apollo program generated seven times the economic activity that it cost, thus completely repaying the government in taxes for its expense, not to mention the enormous PR benefits.
ReplyDeleteCarl Sagan stated something similar in "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future In Space"--he claimed that manned spaceflight generated eight dollars of economic benefit for ever one dollar spent in it.
ReplyDeleteI can't tell you how much I agree with this post. I remember how crushed I felt when my seventh grade algebra teacher said once that we'd never make it to Mars; I had never even realized how important it was to me.
ReplyDeleteAnd I didn't realize how little money goes to space exploration! My friends will sure be surprised (They are the people that say "I'd rather be taxed less than put a few people on a different rock.")