The rumor mill is floating with the supposition that come December 17, President Bush is going to announce a
Bold New Initative for American spaceflight, most likely a pledge to return to the Moon. My own
analysis of the rumor is pretty skeptical, primarily because this isn't the first time a George Bush has promised a
Bold New Initiative for American spaceflight that amounted to not much more than cheap publicity and bad noise.
So this pseduo-announcement hit the blogosphere in the last couple of days, and the reception was lukewarm to say the least, filled with mockery. This should not come as a huge surprise - it is Dubya we're talking about here - but I was surprised, at least, by the commenters who weren't mocking Bush but instead were
mocking the concept of the space program.I. Was. Astounded. Here we had a small but vocal minority of self-styled progressives sneering at one of the most impressive acts that the human species, much less the United States, has ever accomplished. To wit:
"As far as I'm concerned, manned space flight is just for dreamers who grew up on Flash Gordon, Star Wars and the like. We're just not ready for it, in a nutshell."
"as a species we can not afford to sqander the resources on space exploration.
it will cost us the planet we live on while never affording us a replacement.
Why people think it is a viable idea to use Earth at will and just 'go someplace else' when it's used up is beyond me with stupidity."
"Manned space flight is our version of building the pyramids, a squandering of scarce resources in the name of a childish, because impossible dream."
"Star Trek is a nice dream, but it's a long way away. We do not know, really, how to safely get to Mars and back."
"People who put their faith in space travel instead of in real political change are a pathetic lot, not least of which because they aspire to space tech without realizing that the real tech is to survive on this gloriously alive planet without killing it off. We can't afford to waste more money on rock collecting missions."
And so on. The primary arguments boil down to:
1) It's too expensive!
2) We have to solve all our problems here first!
3) Hubris and Vanity! Hubris and Vanity!
4) We don't know how!
5) Aw, lookit the cute little geeks all pretending to be rocket pilots, aren't they so precious?
Taking it from the top:
The first point, the massive waste of money and resources in space flight, turns out to be, well, false. Taking current NASA operations as a starting point, we find that right now we're spending $15.5 billion dollars in the Federal budget. That's a lot of money - certainly it's more than we'll ever have - but compared to the military budget ($379.9 billion), the Social Securty budget ($535 billion), the emergency bailout of Iraq ($87 billion), it really is a drop in the Federal bucket. All of these things get considerably more money every year than NASA does, than NASA
ever has. A reorganization of NASA's priorities to include, for example, a Mars mission, would not increase the budget that much. The private Mars Society claims that the total cost of a landing on Mars would be $30 billion over ten years, NASA's engineers are more cautious, figuring a total cost of $50 billion over the same period. But you know what? That only adds three or five billion to the annual NASA budget.
Furthermore, even if there isn't a cent spent on space exploration,
there is absolutely no way that that saved money will be spent on feeding the poor/saving the world/improving the environment/etc. None. It's a fallacy, and those engaged in it are smarter than that. I hope.
The second point is a form of willful blindness with regard to the nature of problems. The thing is, you
can't solve
all the problems. The funny thing about problems is that, when you solve one, another four pop up to replace it. Every time a new idea becomes widespread, problems stemming from that idea will also show up. Static communities (i.e. houses, towns and cities) cause sanitation problems. Agriculture causes problems with overuse of land, etc.
This is not to say that we shouldn't stop trying to solve these problems. But there is no reason to not keep exploring while we're doing it. If we waited for Utopia to dawn before we did anything, we'd still be a band of primates wandering aimlessly around the African Rift Valley.
The third point is often delivered with "we've fucked up this planet, let's go fuck up the rest of the universe! Whee!" cynical misanthropy that certainly dwarfs any of
my efforts at misanthropy.
Visceral sarcasm aside, the base argument "Hubris and Vanity" has been the party line for kings, priests, CEOs and other authoritarian types for the entirety of human history: Man wasn't meant to fiddle with the Natural Order of Things, any attempt to do so would be unnatural, be content with the way things are, because they'll always be this way. It's an inherently
conservative viewpoint, which makes it strange that so many self-declared
liberals would take that line as gospel.
The fourth point, well... at some point in every job you have to get into learning by experience. We've got a great deal of theoretical work behind us in terms of exploring space, as well as a great deal of practical work completed in terms of how to live and work in space. Also, the probes we've sent across the solar system have done plenty of groundwork in terms of giving us accurate data on conditions at our destination points. We have a better idea of what's waiting for us today than Columbus or Zheng He had when starting out on their expeditions.
The fifth point frankly doesn't deserve a rebuttal. That kind of ugly condesending attitude is
exactly the kind of behavior our ideological opponents would like to tar us with. It doesn't help if we take the attitude on willingly.
Now, let me be honest to the point of social suicide: I am a huge space cadet. I'm too young to remember the moon landings, but I grew up during that heady period when it looked like spaceflight was finally becoming something that anybody could do, at least to orbit, and we'd have space stations and Moon bases and Mars outposts and maybe even acheive that Jupiter mission in 2001.
I am also a partisan Democrat, like most of us here. I firmly believe that George W. Bush has been the most disasterous president our country has had, and it's likely that the future of the United States, and quite possibly Civilization-As-We-Know-It, will hinge on the outcome of the 2004 election.
Given all that, if Bush was to announce
and promote (i.e. do more than make one speech) a pledge to go back to the Moon, or go to Mars, and the Democratic candidate was to say "no, we can't do that," it would require
an effort of will for me to pull the lever for the Democrat.
Why? Because a pledge to go to Mars would give Bush a pass for his prior activities? Of course not. Rather, pulling that lever would be assisting a popular mandate that would cripple the space program for another generation, if not end it outright.
That alone would give me sufficient pause to wonder if I was doing the right thing.
Given that I hold the beliefs I do, I submit that the status of the space program is more important in the long run than the war in Iraq, Bush's shenannigans with the budget, abortion, gay marriage, prayer in schools or any of the other bugbears we like to panic over here. These are utlimately short-term problems. One way or another, they will be sorted out.
I further submit that it is not in the best interests of the Democratic Party to make the reduction of the manned space program an issue. I am
not alone in my beliefs, there
are a lot of us out there, and we
will hesitate if the candidate pledges to cut NASA, no matter how much we despise Bush. It may not be political suicide, but it is
exceptionally stupid.What does all this mad rambling mean?
Well...
If it is not in the best interests of the Democratic Party to abandon the space program, then maybe it is within the best interests of the party to embrace the program? I think so. We need to start looking beyond the next election, to start work on the future of humanity. It won't necessarily be an American future, at least not in the way PNAC or like ghouls would think, but it could be an American future in the way that our society is an Athenian society, or a Roman society. Empires may rise and fall, but to have American progressive ideals be the guiding lights for a future Martian nation, or a new Enlightenment on a planet circling Tau Ceti, that's not a bad deal for a national posterity, really.
It can be done, but will is needed. NASA is a bureaucratic institution, and bureaucracies are by nature conservative creatures. If any goal is to be achieved in space, it has to be made by
political will. NASA needs another Kennedy.
As a campaign plank it would provide something to rally the people behind that doesn't involve guns and bombs and planes and troops, something that we can be
for instead of always being
against one thing or another. We can be
for taking that last step from being a more-clever-than-average terrestrial species into something far greater, possibly unique.
That's one hell of a step, and we can take it. All we have to do is reclaim JFK's dream.
Some talking points to consider:
1) If Bush says we're going back to the moon, given his track record it is extremely unlikely that he'll follow through.
2) Bush has not shown a commitment to science or general research, excepting certain military endeavors, so any tinkering he means to do to the space program is very likely to reduce the useful work it does.
3) The Space Shuttle and ISS are not the best use of dollars currently spent on space.
3a) On the other hand, they are what we're doing now and we're unlikely to abandon them unless either something new is endorsed and funded, or Florida ceases to be a factor in the 2004 elections.
4) Unmanned probes, both in Earth orbit and to other planets are easily worth the money. Anything done to deemphasize the space or earth science mission returns of NASA would be a mistake.
5) Private enterprise can reliably put satellites into low earth orbit. We can privatize this function (and regulate it carefully).
6) There is room for vigorous and honest bipartisan debate on the future and direction of the manned space program. We should have this public debate, but an honest debate is unlikely given the reputation of the Bush Administration.
I now open the floor to comments.
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