Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (29 page)

Why was I livid? Because we were sitting around a table talking about aerospace product as though it were soybeans—what are the trade regulations, the tariffs, the restrictions; if you do this, then we’ll do that. And I’m thinking, There’s something wrong here. Aerospace is a frontier of our technological prowess. If you’re truly on the frontier, you don’t sit at a table negotiating usage rights. You’re so far ahead of everybody, you’re not even worried about what they want. You just give it to them. That’s the posture Americans had for most of the twentieth century. In the fifties, sixties, seventies, part of the eighties, every plane that landed in your city was made in America. From Aerolineas Argentinas to Zambian Airways, everybody flew Boeings. So I got angry—not at the guy sitting across from me, but at us. I got angry with America, because advancing is not just something you do incrementally. You need innovation as well, so that you can achieve revolutionary, not merely evolutionary, advances.

One day I want to take a day trip to Tokyo. That would be a forty-five-minute ride if we go suborbital. How come we’re not doing that now? If we were, I wouldn’t have been at that table with the smug guy talking about the Galileo positioning system. We would already have had a pulsar navigation system, and we just wouldn’t have cared about theirs. We would have been too far ahead.

S
o, I’m angry that aerospace has become a bargaining commodity. Also, because I’m partly an educator, when I stand in front of eighth-graders I don’t want to have to say to them, “Become an aerospace engineer so that you can build an airplane that’s 20 percent more fuel efficient than the ones your parents flew on.” That won’t get them excited. What I need to say is, “Become an aerospace engineer so that you can design the airfoil that will be the first piloted craft in the rarefied atmosphere of Mars.” “Become a biologist because we need people to look for life, not only on Mars but on Europa and elsewhere in the galaxy.” “Become a chemist because we want to understand more about the elements on the Moon and the molecules in space.” You put that vision out there, and my job becomes easy, because I just have to point them to it and the ambition rises up within them. The flame gets lit, and they’re guided on the path.

The Bush administration’s vision statement has been laid down: the Moon, Mars, and beyond. There’s been some controversy at the edges, but it’s fundamentally a sound vision. Not enough of the public knows or understands that. But if I were the pope of Congress, I would deliver an edict to double NASA’s budget. That would take it to around $40 billion. Well, somebody else in town has a $30 billion budget: the National Institutes of Health. That’s fine. They ought to have a big budget, because health matters. But most high-tech medical equipment and procedures—MRIs, PET scans, ultrasound, X-rays—work on principles discovered by physicists and are based on designs developed by engineers. So you can’t just fund medicine; you have to fund the rest of what’s going on. Cross-pollination is fundamental to the enterprise.

What happens when you double NASA’s budget? The vision becomes big; it becomes real. You attract an entire generation, and generations to follow, into science and engineering. You know and I know that all emergent markets in the twenty-first century are going to be driven by science and technology. The foundations of every future economy will require it. And what happens when you stop innovating? Everyone else catches up, your jobs go overseas, and then you cry foul: Ooohh, they’re paying them less over there, and the playing field is not level. Well, stop whining and start innovating.

Let’s talk about true innovation. People often ask, If you like spin-off products, why not just invest in those technologies straightaway, instead of waiting for them to happen as spin-offs? The answer: it just doesn’t work that way. Let’s say you’re a thermodynamicist, the world’s expert on heat, and I ask you to build me a better oven. You might invent a convection oven, or an oven that’s more insulated or that permits easier access to its contents. But no matter how much money I give you, you will not invent a microwave oven. Because that came from another place. It came from investments in communications, in radar. The microwave oven is traceable to the war effort, not to a thermodynamicist.

That’s the kind of cross-pollination that goes on all the time. And that’s why futurists always get it wrong—because they take the current situation and just extrapolate. They don’t see surprises. So they get the picture right for about five years into the future, and they’re hopeless after ten.

I
claim that space is part of our culture. You’ve heard complaints that nobody knows the names of the astronauts, that nobody gets excited about launches, that nobody cares anymore except people in the industry. I don’t believe that for a minute. When fixing the Hubble telescope was in doubt, the loudest protests came from the public. When the space shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry, the nation stopped and mourned. We may not notice something is there, but we sure as hell notice when it’s not there. That’s the definition of culture.

This goes deep. Last year on July 1, the Cassini spacecraft pulled into orbit around Saturn. There was nothing scientific about it, just pulling into orbit. Yet the
Today Show
figured that was news enough to put the story in their first hour—not in the second hour, along with the recipes, but in the first twenty minutes. So they called me in. When I get there, everybody says, “Congratulations! What does this mean?” I tell them it’s great, that we’re going to study Saturn and its moons. Matt Lauer wants to be hard-hitting, though, so he says, “But Dr. Tyson, this is a $3.3 billion mission. Given all the problems we have in the world today, how can you justify that expenditure?” So I say, “First of all, it’s $3.3 billion divided by twelve. It’s a twelve-year mission. Now we have the real number: less than $300 million per year. Hmmm. $300 million. Americans spend more than that per year on lip balm.”

At that moment, the camera shook. You could hear the stage and lighting people giggle. Matt had no rebuttal; he just stuttered and said, “Over to you, Katie.” When I exited the building, up came a round of applause from a group of bystanders who’d been watching the show. And they all held up their ChapSticks, saying, “We want to go to Saturn!”

The penetration is deep, and it’s not just among engineers. When you take a taxi ride in New York, you’re in the back seat, and there’s a barrier there between you and the front seat, so any conversation between you and the driver has to pass through the glass. On one of my recent rides the driver, a talkative guy who couldn’t have been more than twenty-three, said to me, “Wait a minute, I think I recognize your voice. Are you an expert on the galaxy?” So I said, “Yeah, I suppose.” And he said, “Wow, I saw you on a program. It was the best.”

He wasn’t interested in me because of celebrity. That’s a different kind of encounter; that’s people asking you where you live and what’s your favorite color. But no. He starts asking questions: Tell me more about black holes. Tell me more about the galaxy. Tell me more about the search for life. We get to the destination, I’m ready to hand him the money, and he says, “No, keep it.” This guy’s twenty-three years old, with a wife and a kid at home, and he’s driving a taxi. I’m trying to pay him for the ride, and he declines it. That’s how excited he is that he could learn about the universe.

Here’s another one. I’m walking my daughter to school, and I’m ready to cross the street with her. A garbage truck stops right in the crosswalk. Garbage trucks don’t stop in crosswalks. This one stops. And I’m thinking, There was a movie where a garbage truck drove past a guy, and he wasn’t there after it passed. So this worries me a little. Then the driver opens the door—never seen this man in my life—and he calls out, “Dr. Tyson, how are the planets today?” I wanted to go and kiss him.

Here’s my best story of all. It happened at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, where I work. There’s a janitor there who I’ve never seen having a conversation with anyone for the three years he’s been working there. You never know who’s who at these entry-level positions: maybe he’s mute, maybe he’s a little slow. I just don’t know. And then one day, out of the blue, he stops sweeping when he catches sight of me; he stands there holding onto his broom proudly, with posture; and he says, “Dr. Tyson, I have a question. Do you have a minute?” I assume he’s going to ask about the employment situation, and I say, “Yeah, sure, go ahead.” Then he says, “I’ve been thinking. I see all these pictures from the Hubble telescope, and I see all of these gas clouds. And I learned that stars are made of gas. So could it be true that the stars were made inside those gas clouds?” This is the janitor who didn’t say a word for three years, and his first sentence to me is about the astrophysics of the interstellar medium. I ran up to my office, grabbed all seven of my books, handed them to him, and said, “Here, commune with the cosmos. You need more of this.”

M
y final quote of the day says it all: “There are lots of things I have to do to become an astronaut. But first I have to go to kindergarten.”—Cyrus Corey, age four.

If you double NASA’s budget, whole legions of students will fill the pipeline. Even if they don’t become aerospace engineers, we will have scientifically literate people coming up through the ranks—people who might invent stuff and create the foundations of tomorrow’s economy. But that’s not all. Suppose the next terrorist attack is biological warfare? Who are we going to call? We want the best biologists in the world. If there’s chemical warfare, we want the best chemists. And we would have them, because they’d be working on problems relating to Mars, problems relating to Europa. We would have attracted those people because the vision was in place. We wouldn’t have lost them to other professions. They wouldn’t have become lawyers or investment bankers, which is what happened in the 1980s and 1990s.

So this $40 billion starts looking pretty cheap. It becomes not only an investment in tomorrow’s economy but an investment in our security. Our most precious asset is our enthusiasm for what we do as a nation. Marshal it. Cherish it.

• • •
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

DELUSIONS OF SPACE ENTHUSIASTS
^*

H
uman ingenuity seldom fails to improve on the fruits of human invention. Whatever may have dazzled everyone on its debut is almost guaranteed to be superseded and, someday, to look quaint.

In 2000
B.C.
a pair of ice skates made of polished animal bone and leather thongs was a transportation breakthrough. In 1610 Galileo’s eight-power telescope was an astonishing tool of detection, capable of giving the senators of Venice the power to identify hostile ships before they could enter the lagoon. In 1887 the one-horsepower Benz Patent Motorwagen was the first commercially produced car powered by an internal combustion engine. In 1946 the thirty-ton, showroom-size ENIAC, with its eighteen thousand vacuum tubes and six thousand manual switches, pioneered electronic computing.

Today you can glide across roadways on in-line skates, gaze at images of faraway galaxies brought to you by spaceborne telescopes, cruise the autobahn at 170 miles an hour in a six-hundred-horsepower roadster, and carry your three-pound, wirelessly networked laptop to an outdoor café.

Of course, such advances don’t just fall from the sky. Clever people think them up. Problem is, to turn a clever idea into reality, somebody has to write the check. And when market forces shift, those somebodies may lose interest and the checks may stop coming. If computer companies had stopped innovating in 1978, your desk might still sport a hundred-pound IBM 5110. If communications companies had stopped innovating in 1973, you might still be schlepping a two-pound, nine-inch-long cell phone. And if in 1968 the US space industry had stopped developing bigger and better rockets to launch humans beyond the Moon, we’d never have surpassed the Saturn V rocket.

Oops!

Sorry about that. We
haven’t
surpassed the Saturn V, the largest, most powerful rocket flown by anybody, ever. The thirty-six-story-tall Saturn V was the first and only rocket to launch people from Earth to someplace else in the universe; it enabled every Apollo mission to the Moon from 1969 through 1972, as well as the 1973 launch of Skylab 1, the first US space station.

Inspired in part by the successes of the Saturn V and the momentum of the Apollo program, visionaries of the day foretold a future that never came to be: space habitats, Moon bases, and Mars colonies up and running by the 1990s. But funding for the Saturn V evaporated as the Moon missions wound down. Additional production runs were canceled, the manufacturers’ specialized machine tools were destroyed, and skilled personnel had to find work on other projects. Today US engineers can’t even build a Saturn V clone.

What cultural forces froze the Saturn V rocket in time and space? What misconceptions led to the gap between expectation and reality?

Soothsaying tends to come in two flavors: doubt and delirium. It was doubt that led skeptics to declare that the atom would never be split, the sound barrier would never be broken, and people would never want or need computers in their homes. But in the case of the Saturn V rocket, it was delirium that misled futurists into assuming the Saturn V was an auspicious beginning—never considering that it could, instead, be an end.

O
n December 30, 1900, for its last Sunday paper of the year, the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
published a sixteen-page supplement headlined “THINGS WILL BE SO DIFFERENT A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE.” The contributors—business leaders, military men, pastors, politicians, and experts of every persuasion—imagined what housework, poverty, religion, sanitation, and war would be like in the year 2000. They enthused about the potential of electricity and the automobile. There was even a map of the world-to-be, showing an American Federation comprising most of the Western Hemisphere from the lands above the Arctic Circle down to the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego—plus sub-Saharan Africa, the southern half of Australia, and all of New Zealand.

Most of the writers portrayed an expansive future. George H. Daniels, however, a man of authority at the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, peered into his crystal ball and boneheadedly predicted:

It is scarcely possible that the twentieth century will witness improvements in transportation that will be as great as were those of the nineteenth century.

Elsewhere in his article, Daniels envisioned affordable global tourism and the diffusion of white bread to China and Japan. Yet he simply couldn’t imagine what might replace steam as the power source for ground transportation, let alone a vehicle moving through the air. Even though he stood on the doorstep of the twentieth century, this manager of the world’s biggest railroad system could not see beyond the automobile, the locomotive, and the steamship.

Three years later, almost to the day, Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first-ever series of powered, controlled, heavier-than-air flights. In 1957 the USSR launched the first satellite into Earth orbit. And in 1969 two Americans became the first human beings to walk on the Moon.

Daniels is hardly the only person to have misread the technological future. Even experts who aren’t totally deluded can have tunnel vision. On page 13 of the
Eagle
’s Sunday supplement, the principal examiner at the US Patent Office, W. W. Townsend, wrote, “The automobile may be the vehicle of the decade, but the air ship is the conveyance of the century.” Sounds visionary, until you read further. What he was talking about were blimps and zeppelins. Both Daniels and Townsend, otherwise well-informed citizens of a changing world, were clueless about what tomorrow’s technology would bring.

E
ven the Wright brothers were guilty of doubt about the future of aviation. In 1901, discouraged by a summer’s worth of unsuccessful tests with a glider, Wilbur told Orville it would take another fifty years for someone to fly. Nope: the birth of aviation was just two years away. On the windy, chilly morning of December 17, 1903, starting from a North Carolina sand dune called Kill Devil Hill, Orville was the first to fly the brothers’ six-hundred-pound plane through the air. His epochal journey lasted twelve seconds and covered 120 feet—about the distance a child can throw a ball.

Judging by what the mathematician, astronomer, and Royal Society gold medalist Simon Newcomb had published just two months earlier, the flight from Kill Devil Hill should never have taken place when it did:

Quite likely the twentieth century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exceeding that of the bird.

But when we inquire whether aerial flight is possible in the present state of our knowledge; whether, with such materials as we possess, a combination of steel, cloth and wire can be made which, moved by the power of electricity or steam, shall form a successful flying machine, the outlook may be altogether different.

Some representatives of informed public opinion went even further. The
New York Times
was steeped in doubt just one week before the Wright brothers went aloft in the original Wright Flyer. Writing on December 10, 1903—not about the Wrights but about their illustrious and publicly funded competitor, Samuel P. Langley, an astronomer, physicist, and chief administrator of the Smithsonian Institution—the
Times
declared:

We hope that Professor Langley will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time, and the money involved, in further airship experiments. Life is short, and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly.

You might think attitudes would have changed as soon as people from several countries had made their first flights. But no. Wilbur Wright wrote in 1909 that no flying machine would ever make the journey from New York to Paris. Richard Burdon Haldane, the British secretary of war, told Parliament in 1909 that even though the airplane might one day be capable of great things, “from the war point of view, it is not so at present.” Ferdinand Foch, a highly regarded French military strategist and the supreme commander of the Allied forces near the end of World War I, opined in 1911 that airplanes were interesting toys but had no military value. Late that same year, near Tripoli, an Italian plane became the first to drop a bomb.

E
arly
attitudes about flight beyond Earth’s atmosphere followed a similar trajectory. True, plenty of philosophers, scientists, and sci-fi writers had thought long and hard about outer space. The sixteenth-century philosopher-friar Giordano Bruno proposed that intelligent beings inhabited an infinitude of worlds. The seventeenth-century soldier-writer Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac portrayed the Moon as a world with forests, violets, and people.

But those writings were fantasies, not blueprints for action. By the early twentieth century, electricity, telephones, automobiles, radios, airplanes, and countless other engineering marvels were all becoming basic features of modern life. So couldn’t earthlings build machines capable of space travel? Many people who should have known better said it couldn’t be done, even after the successful 1942 test launch of the world’s first long-range ballistic missile, the deadly V-2 rocket. Capable of punching through Earth’s atmosphere, it was a crucial step toward reaching the Moon.

Richard van der Riet Woolley, the eleventh British Astronomer Royal, is the source of a particularly woolly remark. When he landed in London after a thirty-six-hour flight from Australia, some reporters asked him about space travel. “It’s utter bilge,” he answered. That was in early 1956. In early 1957 Lee De Forest, a prolific American inventor who helped birth the age of electronics, declared, “Man will never reach the moon, regardless of all future scientific advances.” Remember what happened in late 1957? Not just one but two Soviet Sputniks entered Earth orbit. The space race had begun.

Whenever someone says an idea is “bilge” (British for “baloney”), you must first ask whether it violates any well-tested laws of physics. If so, the idea is likely to be bilge. If not, the only challenge is to find a clever engineer—and, of course, a committed source of funding.

T
he day the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, a chapter of science fiction became science fact, and the future became the present. All of a sudden, futurists went overboard with their enthusiasm. The delusion that technology would advance at lightning speed replaced the delusion that it would barely advance at all. Experts went from having much too little confidence in the pace of technological change to having much too much. And the guiltiest people of all were the space enthusiasts.

Commentators became fond of twenty-year intervals, within which some previously inconceivable goal would supposedly be accomplished. On January 6, 1967, in a front-page story, the
Wall Street Journal
announced: “The most ambitious US space endeavor in the years ahead will be the campaign to land men on neighboring Mars. Most experts estimate the task can be accomplished by 1985.” The very next month, in its debut issue,
The Futurist
magazine announced that according to long-range forecasts by the RAND Corporation, a pioneer think-tank, there was a 60 percent probability that a manned lunar base would exist by 1986. In
The Book of Predictions,
published in 1980, the rocket pioneer Robert C. Truax forecast that fifty thousand people would be living and working in space by the year 2000. When that benchmark year arrived, people were indeed living and working in space. But the tally was not fifty thousand. It was three: the first crew of the International Space Station.