The forgotten frontier

United States must make space exploration a priority

By Philip Kahn and Jessica Mintz
From the March 2006 Print Edition

Far from realizing the extraordinary dreams of science-fiction greats like Isaac Asimov and Gene Rodenberry, the manned space program in America has been drifting aimlessly now for decades with precious little to show for itself. Beset by tragedy, witch hunts, and the impossible dream of absolute safety, America has lost the passion for exploration that landed the first man on the moon. Important small steps, all unmanned, have been taken, from the Mars Pathfinder launch in 1996 to the spectacular, ongoing Martian saga of rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and the more recent New Horizons spacecraft just launched on its mission to Pluto, but we have not put a man on the moon in more than thirty years. This neglect consigns manned deep space exploration to a distant dream.

In 2004, President Bush unveiled a plan to expand NASA’s budget and shift the nature of its objectives, returning mankind to the moon by 2020 with the ultimate goal of taking us to Mars. The cost of launching and operating manned space missions from a permanent moon base would be astronomically less (no pun intended) than doing so from here on earth. While ambitious and, despite the moon’s gravitational advantages, initially expensive at an additional $1 billion over a period of five years, the Bush plan offers at least a glimmer of hope for the eager explorers of our generation.

The skeptics who don’t believe a human presence in space warrants the necessary additional expense are difficult to convince. The difference between a probe sent to Mars and a manned mission is somewhat like the difference between looking at a photograph of Stonehenge and actually visiting it. As astronaut and moon-walker Dave Scott once said, there’s something to be said for exploring beautiful places.

In addition, establishing a permanent residence on Mars could prompt the beginning of terraforming, a century long process that would use greenhouse gases and other means to heat Mars and completely alter its environment into something in which humans could survive without spacesuits. To speed up the process, a tax deduction could be given to SUV and Hummer drivers who are willing to relocate to the planet.

But for the people to whom the thrill of exploration and the necessity of a second habitable planet cannot be communicated, more “down to earth” practical and economic justifications for space exploration are needed.

Enter SpaceShipOne, winner of the Ansari X Prize and a cool $10 million, which climbed more than 71 miles into the California sky in 2004 and forever changed the way people think about space travel. This privately funded and constructed spacecraft paved the way for an entirely new industry: space tourism. The thing the space program has lacked thus far is a way to be directly profitable, and this may be the breakthrough that will catalyze the next great wave of human expansion. Is private industry the entity that will pave the way to Mars? Probably not (yet, at least).

At present, individuals and private companies alone do not have the capital necessary to finance such an operation, but as space travel becomes more commonplace and the technology more sophisticated, the cost will decrease and government or private ventures will become more feasible. The cell phone, for example, was once a military device, then a luxury and symbol of wealth for the successful businessman, and is now about as common as bellybuttons. Space itself and the products that result from the research conducted there will be inaccessible at first to most of us, but the technical and financial successes of these endeavors will inevitably enhance the lives of all.

The scientists and engineers who first dreamed of voyages into outer space faced another relevant challenge. To accomplish this task, they reasoned, we must design a vehicle and propulsion system that will take us out of the atmosphere, beyond the life support that can protect us from the harshest of conditions, and develop new technology that fosters easy and quick communication between the spacecraft and earth.

Hundreds of products we take for granted originated from or were improved upon by these ideas and other research conducted in space. The Dustbuster, trash compactor, water filter, smoke detector, and cordless drill are all inventions directly resulting from the hard work of innovators at NASA. Even the barcode, which is now on millions of products throughout the world, was originally developed to keep track of spacecraft parts.

The full potential for this type of innovation has not nearly been reached. Therefore, the Democrat who would sooner spend billions on social welfare programs than on space exploration is ironically doing a serious disservice to humanity.

For now, we are confined to our own solar system. Our sun’s closest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri, is 4.2 light-years (over 24 trillion miles) away. Speeds of even 50,000 miles per hour would still require almost 60,000 years of travel time. Advances in propulsion or more exotic technologies will one day lead us to other stars, but for now we must explore what exists for us here in our own small system.

When you are looking up at the stars and into the past, remember that it is you and your representatives who will decide whether or not our brave American astronauts will have the opportunity to explore a new planet and lead humanity into a limitless future. How soon we act may determine whether they find an unexplored, untouched landscape filled with opportunity … or a Chinese flag billowing in the Martian wind.

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