While America recalls the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s gentle steps on a far away place, Tom Wolfe says Armstrong’s feat (no pun intended) was the beginning of the end of human exploration.
There are many reasons why. One, spending money on space is a hard sell to many. Two, Wolfe denounces NASA and a lack of institutional drive while no one is there to philosophically lead the charge like a Werner Van Braun.
NASA’s annual budget sank like a stone from $5 billion in the mid-1960s to $3 billion in the mid-1970s. It was at this point that NASA’s lack of a philosopher corps became a real problem. The fact was, NASA had only one philosopher, Werner von Braun. Toward the end of his life, von Braun knew he was dying of cancer and became very contemplative. I happened to hear him speak at a dinner in his honor in San Francisco. He raised the question of what the space program was really all about.
It’s been a long time, but I remember him saying something like this: Here on Earth we live on a planet that is in orbit around the Sun. The Sun itself is a star that is on fire and will someday burn up, leaving our solar system uninhabitable. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of.
I’m not one to worry about the sun burning out, but I do wonder about the lack of initiative and ambition in society. We once leaped continents on tiny wooden boats, sent men in planes the size of boxes across oceans, defeated vast armies from around the globe, conquered diseases, halted nature with giant dams and did it while smoking a Marlboro and having a beer afterward. Today such rugged individualistic determination is frowned upon, called all the usual buzz words – indulgent, fascistic, and that nasty one, Republican of all things. It used to be called human. In the old days, they even made TV shows about this type of achievement – Star Trek for one, before the 80s came and the universe became more sullen, homogenized, less like John Wayne’s Monument Valley and a place to sign treaties, not to pave a way through the great unknown.
The Apollo 11 capsules had all the capability of a modern calculator. Somehow men used these devices to travel the stars. Today, with all the technology in hand, NASA couldn’t put another man on the moon if it tried.
Time to aim again for the stars. It won’t happen under Obama, who would rather pass out numbers at a health clinic than look to the sky. But maybe the day will come where humans will yearn for the stars.
Forty years! For 40 years, everybody at NASA has known that the only logical next step is a manned Mars mission, and every overture has been entertained only briefly by presidents and the Congress. They have so many more luscious and appealing projects that could make better use of the close to $10 billion annually the Mars program would require. There is another overture even at this moment, and it does not stand a chance in the teeth of Depression II.
“Why not send robots?” is a common refrain. And once more it is the late Wernher von Braun who comes up with the rejoinder. One of the things he most enjoyed saying was that there is no computerized explorer in the world with more than a tiny fraction of the power of a chemical analog computer known as the human brain, which is easily reproduced by unskilled labor.
What NASA needs now is the power of the Word. On Darwin’s tongue, the Word created a revolutionary and now well-nigh universal conception of the nature of human beings, or, rather, human beasts. On Freud’s tongue, the Word means that at this very moment there are probably several million orgasms occurring that would not have occurred had Freud never lived. Even the fact that he is proved to be a quack has not diminished the power of his Word.
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What strikes me as odd is that space colonization used to be a secular substitute for the Kingdom of God–”Our world will die, but our race will go on and on.”
But today The People Who Matter believe that salvation is found in phasing people out altogether, so that earth can blossom without us. Thus, the last thing they want is to spread the “disease” of humanity.
And that, oddly enough, puts them in agreement with C. S. Lewis’ arguments against space colonization. Only on different grounds.
By and by Man will try
To get out into the sky,
Sailing far beyond the air
From Down and Here to Up and There.
Stars and sky, sky and stars
Make us feel the prison bars.
Suppose it done. Now we ride
Closed in steel, up there, outside
Through our port-holes see the vast
Heaven-scape go rushing past.
Shall we? All that meets the eye
Is sky and stars, stars and sky.
Points of light with black between
Hang like a painted scene,
Motionless, no nearer there
Than on Earth, and everywhere
Equidistant from our ship:
Heaven has given us the slip.
Hush, be still. Outer space
Is a concept, not a place.
Try no more. Where we are
Never can be sky or star.
From prison, in a prison, we fly;
There is no way into the sky.
–C.S. Lewis, “Science Fiction Cradle Song”
I find it strange and interesting that smart folks like JohnFN, who know about and oppose the inherent incompetence and inefficiency of government control of anything, buys into the idea that the problem in manned space exploration was a lack of vision and purpose.
Nasa funding and political will and vision are not the problem. Nasa itself IS the problem, and has been since the top administrator oversold (lied) to Nixon about the costs and efficiency of the Shuttle program in order to keep the manned space program bureaucracy going. This culminated in the 100 billion dollar space station, which exists mainly as a place for the $500mill per launch, non human rated space shuttle to go to.
Right now, Nasa is “going back to the moon”, in systems designed, not for maximum efficiency but for maximization of political funding. Subsequently, once again, they are having difficulties which have driven the price much higher and the schedule much longer than initially proposed.
I have no qualms with admitting the bureaucratic disaster that NASA has become. Victor Davis Hanson has mentioned it before, as have his lessors such as myself.
Wolfe sees it as a lack of institutional drive. I think that is a key ingredient in any operation – to have leadership, focused at that. I blame the lack of imagination. People rarely see outside their borders or their world anymore. I can’t recall the last time I saw two kids playing pretend – they don’t need to. Want to be a soldier? Fire up Call of Duty. Want to fly? Why bother when we can see everything from our laptop on Google Earth.
It’s a lack of a sense of adventure in everyone. A great part, one of many, in the movie Up was opening with old newsreels and the sense of adventure the film instilled. Kids used to get that thrill up their leg with an old milk crate some sticks and a backyard. Now they get their sip with two hours of Pixar before soldiering on to soccer practice, soccer camp, soccer club and soccer games (insert activity of choice) if they’re lucky and not locked up in kinder care for six hours of Dr. Spock’s ancestors.
I had the best childhood in history. Bar none. I can label all the best parts – having two parents who loved me, two brothers or a bunch of friends. Maybe the best was this pair of scarred knees I now possess thanks to 16 years of scrapes.
Spot on JohnFN. Nobody seems to have the “right stuff” anymore. If you ask anyone under, say 30, if they have the right stuff, they’re most likely going to talk about their HDTV, Blackberry, or BMW.
When I was a kid in Nebraska, I’d lay out in the grass and watch the B36s flying across east towards Offut Air Force Base, listening to the drone of their 6 turboprops, a sound I can still hear in my imagination to this day. At night I’d get out the starcharts and my friends and I would make those exploritory space trips in our minds, to distant planets. Now, half of the kids are looking at porno on the web, or griping because there’s nothing to watch on cable. Very, very sad!
Must be an Ohio thing, JFN, though acquired my scarred knees from the fall following 40 feet of being jettisoned from a car. Too many best parts to count and if my brothers weren’t able to kick my ass these days (it’s a sad day for the oldest brother when that day comes) I’d throttle them for complaining at all about our amazing childhoods.
Well it definitely must be an Ohio thing, because I was jettisoned once from a car when the side door wasn’t latched properly. Fortunately, I fared better than you. I was sitting in the car, next thing I know I was rolled up against a No Parking sign with, you guessed it, a really scrapped up knee. Not bad for rolling into a busy side street at 35 miles per hour.
Latched side-door? Didn’t realize you were Amish and how in God’s name did you get the horse to gallop 35 MPH?
If by Amish buggy you mean “68 Dodge Dart” you are correct.
Ok, so here’s what happened: The world in 1970 was a very different place from 1960. Competition in space, and makin’ the ruskies look bad by beating them to the moon was all well and good, but by 1970 they’d lost and there was little to be gained from rubbing their noses in it. At the same time, space is amazingly expensive and politicaly fickle. Kennedy started the manned space program, for instance, but who got the political payoff of it? Nixon and the Republicans. In addition, it’s dangerous. If anyone died on the moon, or in space, it was political disaster for the US. And of course the Vietnam War was pretty expensive as well. So we were shelling out a ton of money on space, and getting very little back from it in a political sense. Nixon wanted out.
Follow me so far? Ok…
Now there was a political wedge developing between the USSR and China, and Nixon saw that by normalizing relations with China, he could increase the distance between the PRC and USSR, which, again, was to our advantage. Instead of posing a unified threat against us, we ended up in the 70s with a trilateral rivalry, and – as some of you may recall – the possibility of a war between the USSR and the PRC was a very real possibility through the middle of the decade.
So with relations with China more-or-less normalized, and the USSR suddenly feeling surrounded on all sides, Nixon went to them and brokered Detente, which effectively thawed the cold war until that idiot Carter screwed it up.
While visiting Russia in 1972, Nixon met with premier Kosygin, and a lot of the details of that discussion have not yet been made public, however they are known to have discussed their respective space programs in great detail. The deal they hammered out can basically be summed up by “Look, you guys can’t get to the moon if we’re there, and we can’t stop going to the moon if you’re continuing to try and get there, so let’s just stop, ok? We’ll stop going if you’ll stop trying, and both of us will confine ourselves to orbital missions, where we’ll cooperate internationally.” The Apollo/Soyuz mission was brokered in this meeting, as was “Skylab-B,” a jointly-operated US/USSR space station that was, again, shut down by that idiot Carter. We quickly cancelled our final three missions to the moon, and sure enough in december of 1972, while Apollo 17 was on their way back to earth, Nixon gave a speech about how “People from earth will not set foot on the moon again in this century.”
Indeed, the remainder of space exploration up until our own time has continued along the lines of the Nixon/Kosygin handshake deal, which was basically “We won’t embaras you in space if you don’t embaras us,” and in an environment like that, no one is going to Mars, and there’s no competition at all.
No competition = no advancement.
NASA’s role since 1972 “has been to *limit* access to space, not to expand it, and anyone who hasn’t realized that simply hasn’t been paying attention.” as Stephen Baxter said
Three easy steps to restoring competition in space:
1. Liquidate NASA and send the assets over the armed forces. They already have plenty of experience in space-based assets. The Air Force, for example, already runs a space program about the same size as NASA’s.
2. Establish a Pioneer or Sojourner Corps, that can act as astronauts, military PR reps, and testers for research and prototype equipment. The military will eat that up and fund it handsomely.
3. Hold open competitions between private groups and military teams with cash prizes.
Ta da! Competition in space.
We piss countless billions away every year on countless liberal wetdreams..sod em!….lets head for the stars.
NASA seems institutionally incapable of making a good decision these days The Ares/Orion program is a deathtrap,, and very little that they do makes sense.
One of the benefits of the dot-com boom (among those who actually were able to hold on to their money) is that it generated some super-rich people who are willing to risk their capital to open up space within the private sector. I know it’s silly of me to think that a gov’t agency would willingly devolve its power, but if NASA scaled back to become more like the FAA and regulated (rather than monopolized) access to space, we’d be a lot better off. (And if NASA just went away along with certain other ‘Alphabet Agencies’, I would not shed a tear.)
If space exploration is such a boon, why doesn’t some VERY industrious entrepreneur do it without government funding?
Yeah, yeah, yeah … it costs a lot of money, and the Change of Use Permit for the launch pad might be a bit tough to obtain from your local city building department. I’m just wonderin’ …
Daniel – we don’t have a cash crop yet. That is to say there’s not some profitable thing that we’ve discovered up there that people can’t get down here. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist – I can think of several potential ones off the top of my head – but we haven’t actually spent any time looking in to making it profitable. No one goes exploring for very long without hope of profit, and they certainly don’t colonize anywhere without seeing some advantage for themselves in doing so.
Thud – the money “Saved” by prematurely cancelling the Apollo Program was only about 36 million dollars, all of which went in to Government Cheese Subsidies in Wisconsin, which not-at-all-coincidentally happened to be the home state of Senator William Proxmire, the cheif opponent of the space program.
Ah yes. The dreaded “Cheese for Pork Program”!
+JMJ+
JohnFN, I grew up in the 1980s and so my childhood probably couldn’t hold a candle to yours, but even I notice and find sad that “kids these days” think that playing make-believe involves powering up the Playstation first.
Actually I did grow up in the 80s and my childhood was great.
I for one, welcome our orbital-railgun-owning entrepreneur overlords.
I’d love to see humans colonize space, but it’s probably not going to happen because there’s no _money_ in it. The cost of the oxygen and water a human in space need to survive exceed the value of anything they could make and ship home to Earth. (Unless said orbital railgun was used to ransom a major city, or something.)
Bush seemed all keen to go back to the moon–I guess someone told him there was oil there.
Bush seemed all keen to go back to the moon–I guess someone told him there was oil there.
No oil, but there is Helium-3, which might be a “miracle” fusion fuel, and large deposits of titanium. And there are large meteors and asteroids in the Kuiper belt and around the solar system which contain many trillions of dollars in valuable metals and minerals.
Lars,weren’t the Vikings sort of the astronauts of their day?
Are you saying our astronauts should rape, pillage and loot?
@ Casm in Space – thing is, there *is* money in space. The startup costs are admittedly ungodly, but if you can get 10 megatons of solar power cells in low earth orbit, and have them beam back electricity in microwave form to some kind of receiving antenna on the ground, that’s something on the order of a half billion dollars of income per day!
There’s lots of hydrogen in space, there’s gigatons of oxygen locked in the soil on the moon – put them together and you’ve got…water. No need to haul it up from earth.
The reason people assume there’s nothing worth exploiting up there is because they’ve been *told* that there’s nothing worth exploiting up there, and the reason they’ve been told that is simply because it’s politically not desirable for folks to do it. The US doesn’t want to shell out the money, the USSR didn’t have the money to shell out, and neither side wants to deal with a “Moon is a Harsh Mistress” situation a century or two down the road, which would inevitably happen…so better to keep the lid on the kettle. Or so our politicoes think.
Yeah, hence my railgun crack.
I’d like to see space colonies in my lifetime. I’m just not betting on them. *sigh*.
There’s lots of hydrogen in space Unintentional Understatement of the Week award winner, Threedonia.com July 19 – 26th, 2009
First we’d walk upon the Moon,
Then we’d land on Mars,
The asteroids, the planets,
And finally the Stars.
That beautiful Tomorrow,
Waiting on today…
Screwing in the mud at Woodstock
We threw it all away.
We preferred to gorge on slogans
And masturbate with angst;
Instead of firing rockets
We wound up shooting blanks;
We scorned the triumphs of science
And raised superstition high –
To screw in the mud at Woodstock
We sacrificed the sky.
What’s the point of spaceflight
Or the point of war and strife?
And what’s the point of science
If it won’t extend MY life?
We reject the claims of history,
With its tears and sweat and blood:
We think mankind’s finest hour
Was an orgy in the mud.
We abandoned our ambitions
For short-term pleasure schemes
And arrested our development
With counterfeited dreams;
We demanded dope and circuses,
Enough for you and me –
We screwed in the mud at Woodstock,
Then went home and watched TV.
– HeadlessUnicornGuy and JakeWasHere