Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (2 page)

PROLOGUE

Space Politics

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that!”

—
E
DGAR
M
ITCHELL,
A
POLLO 14 ASTRONAUT, 1974

Some people think emotionally more often than they think politically. Some think politically more often than they think rationally. Others never think rationally about anything at all.

No judgment implied. Just an observation.

Some of the most creative leaps ever taken by the human mind are decidedly irrational, even primal. Emotive forces are what drive the greatest artistic and inventive expressions of our species. How else could the sentence “He’s either a madman or a genius” be understood?

It’s okay to be entirely rational, provided everybody else is too. But apparently this state of existence has been achieved only in fiction, as in the case of the Houyhnhnms, the community of intelligent horses that Lemuel Gulliver stumbles upon during his early eighteenth-century travels (the name “Houyhnhnm” translates from the local language as “perfection of nature”). We also find a rational society among the Vulcan race in the perennially popular science-fiction series
Star Trek
. In both worlds, societal decisions get made with efficiency and dispatch, devoid of pomp, passion, and pretense.

To govern a society shared by people of emotion, people of reason, and everybody in between—as well as people who think their actions are shaped by logic but in fact are shaped by feelings or nonempirical philosophies—you need politics. At its best, politics navigates all these mind-states for the sake of the greater good, alert to the rocky shoals of community, identity, and the economy. At its worst, politics thrives on the incomplete disclosure and misrepresentation of data required by an electorate to make informed decisions, whether arrived at logically or emotionally.

On this landscape we find intractably diverse political views, with no obvious hope of consensus or even convergence. Some of the hottest of the hot-button issues include abortion, capital punishment, defense spending, financial regulation, gun control, and tax laws. Where you stand on these issues correlates strongly with your political party’s portfolio of beliefs. In some cases it’s more than correlation; it’s the foundation of a political identity.

All this may leave you wondering how anything productive can ever happen under a politically fractious government. As comedian and talk-show host Jon Stewart observed, if con is the opposite of pro, then Congress must be the opposite of progress.

U
ntil recently, space exploration stood above party politics. NASA was more than bipartisan; it was nonpartisan. Specifically, a person’s support for NASA was uncorrelated with whether or not that person was liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, urban or rural, impoverished or wealthy.

NASA’s placement in American culture further bears this out. The ten NASA centers are geographically distributed across eight states. Following the 2008 federal election, they were represented in the House by six Democrats and four Republicans; in the 2010 election that distribution was reversed. Senators from those states are similarly balanced, with eight Republicans and eight Democrats. This “left-right” representation has been a persistent feature of NASA’s support over the years. The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 became law under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower. Democratic president John F. Kennedy launched the Apollo program in 1961. Republican president Richard M. Nixon’s signature is on the plaque left on the Moon in 1969 by the Apollo 11 astronauts.

And maybe it’s just coincidence, but twenty-four astronauts hail from the swing state of Ohio—more than from any other state—including John Glenn (America’s first to orbit Earth) and Neil Armstrong (the world’s first to walk on the Moon).

If partisan politics ever leaked into NASA’s activities, it tended to appear on the fringes of operations. For example, President Nixon could, in principle, have dispatched the newly commissioned USS
John F. Kennedy
aircraft carrier to pluck the Apollo 11 command module from the Pacific Ocean. That would have been a nice touch. Instead he sent the USS
Hornet
, a more expedient option at the time. The
Kennedy
never saw the Pacific, and was in dry dock in Portsmouth, Virginia, for the July 1969 splashdown. Consider another example: With top cover from the industry-friendly Republican president Ronald Reagan, Congress passed the Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984, which not only allowed but also encouraged civilian access to NASA-funded innovations related to launch vehicles and space hardware, thereby opening the space frontier to the private sector. A Democrat might or might not have thought up that legislation, but a Republican Senate and a Democratic House of Representatives both passed it, and the concept is as American as a moonwalk.

O
ne could further argue that NASA’s achievements transcend nations. Stunning images of the cosmos from the Hubble Space Telescope have brought the distant universe into focus for everyone with an Internet connection. Apollo astronauts have appeared on postage stamps from other countries, including Dubai and Qatar. And in the 2006 documentary
In the Shadow of the Moon,
Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean, the fourth person to walk on the Moon, comments that during his international travels people would jubilantly declare, “We did it!” They didn’t say, “You did it!” or “America did it!” The moonwalkers, though 83 percent military and 100 percent American male, were emissaries of our species, not of a nation or political ideology.

Although NASA has historically been free from partisanship, it’s been anything but free from politics itself, driven especially by international forces much greater than any purely domestic initiatives can muster. With the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, America was spooked into the space race. A year later, NASA itself was birthed in a climate of Cold War fears. Mere weeks after the Soviets put the first person into orbit, the United States was spooked into creating the Apollo program to the Moon. Over that time, the Soviet Union beat us in practically every important measure of space achievement: first spacewalk, longest spacewalk, first woman in space, first docking in space, first space station, longest time logged in space. By declaring the race to be about reaching the Moon and nothing else, America gave itself permission to ignore the contests lost along the way.

Having beaten the Russians to the Moon, we declare victory and—with no chance of their putting a person on the lunar surface—we stop going there altogether. What happens next? The Russians “threaten” to build massive space platforms equipped to observe all that happens on Earth’s surface. This decades-long effort, which begins in 1971 with a series of Salyut (Russian for “salute”) space modules, culminates with space station Mir (Russian for “peace”), the world’s first permanently inhabited space platform, whose assembly began in 1986. Once again, being reactive rather than proactive to geopolitical forces, America concludes that we need one of those too. In his 1984 State of the Union address, President Reagan announces rather urgent plans to design and build Space Station Freedom, with nations friendly to our politics joining the effort. Though approved by Congress, the project’s full scope and expense does not survive 1989, the year that peace breaks out in Europe as the Cold War draws to a close. President Clinton collects the underfunded pieces and, by 1993, puts into play a reconceived platform—the International Space Station (some assembly required)—that calls for the participation of former archenemy Russia. This strategic move offers wayward Russian nuclear scientists and engineers something interesting to do other than make weapons of mass destruction for our emergent adversaries around the globe. That same year would see the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider, an expensive physics experiment that had been approved in the 1980s during a Cold War Congress. Unaffordable cost overruns are the reason usually cited for the cancellation, but one cannot ignore the politically abrasive fact that the space station and the collider would both be managed in Texas, amounting to more pork than any state deserves in a single budget cycle. History, however, offers an even deeper reason. In peacetime, the collider did not enjoy the same strategic value to America’s national security as did the space station. Once again, politics and war trumped the urge to discover.

Other than military alliances, the International Space Station remains one of the most successful collaborations of countries. Besides Russia, participating members include Canada, Japan, Brazil, and eleven member nations of the European Space Agency: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Citing human rights violations, we exclude China from this collaboration. But that’s not enough to stymie an ambitious country. Undeterred, China births an independent manned space program, launching Yang Liwei as its first taikonaut in 2003. Like the first American astronauts, Yang was a fighter pilot. The choice of Yang, together with other posturings within China’s space program, such as the kinetic kill of a defunct but still-orbiting weather satellite by a medium-range ballistic missile, causes some American analysts to see China as an adversary, with the capacity to threaten US access to space as well as US assets that reside there.

Wouldn’t it be a curious twist of events if China’s vigorous response to our denial of their participation in the International Space Station turns out to be the very force that sparks another series of competitive space achievements in America, culminating this time around in a manned mission to Mars?

A
veraged over its history, NASA spends about $100 billion in today’s dollars every five or six years. Hardly anywhere in that stream of money have NASA’s most expensive initiatives (including the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, propulsion research, the space shuttle, and the space station) been driven by science or discovery or the betterment of life on Earth. When science does advance, when discovery does unfold, when life on Earth does improve, they happen as an auxiliary benefit and not as a primary goal of NASA’s geopolitical mission.

Failure to embrace these simple realities has led to no end of delusional analysis of what NASA is about, where NASA has been, and where NASA will likely ever go.

On July 20, 1989, twenty years to the day after the Apollo 11 Moon landing, President George Bush Sr. delivered a speech at the National Air and Space Museum, using the auspicious anniversary to announce the Space Exploration Initiative. It reaffirmed the need for Space Station Freedom, but also called for a permanent presence on the Moon and a manned voyage to Mars. Invoking Columbus, the president likened his plan to epic episodes of discovery in the history of nations. He said all the right things, at the right time and the right place. So how could the stirring rhetoric not have worked? It worked for President Kennedy on September 12, 1962, at Rice University Stadium in Houston. That’s when and where he described what would become the Apollo program, declaring, with politically uncommon fiscal candor: “To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. This year’s space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined.”

Maybe all Bush needed was some of that famous charisma that Kennedy exuded. Or maybe he needed something else.

Shortly after Bush’s speech, a group led by the director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center presented a cost analysis for the entire plan that reported a coffer-constricting, Congress-choking price tag of $500 billion over twenty to thirty years. The Space Exploration Initiative was dead on arrival. Was it any more costly than what Kennedy asked for, and got? No. It was less. Not only that, since $100 billion over five or six years represents NASA’s baseline funds, thirty years of that spending level gets you to the $500 billion mark without ever having to top up the budget.

The opposite outcomes of these two speeches had nothing do with political will, public sentiment, persuasiveness of arguments, or even cost. President Kennedy was at war with the Soviet Union, whereas President Bush wasn’t at war with anybody. When you’re at war, money flows like a tapped keg, rendering irrelevant the existence or absence of other variables, charisma included.

Meanwhile, space zealots who do not properly factor the role of war into the spending landscape are delusionally certain that all we need today are risk-taking visionaries like JFK. Couple that with the right dose of political will, they contend, and we surely would have been on Mars long ago, with hundreds if not thousands of people living and working in space colonies. Princeton space visionary Gerard K. O’Neill, among others, imagined all this in place by the year 2000.

The opposite of space zealots—space curmudgeons—are those who are certain that NASA is a waste of taxpayer money and that funds allocated via NASA centers are the equivalent of pork-barrel spending. Genuine pork, of course, is money procured by individual members of Congress for the exclusive benefit of their own districts, with no tangible gain to any other. NASA, by and large, is the opposite of this. The nation and the world thrive on NASA’s regional innovations, which have transformed how we live.