Our betters, religious and secular, like to instruct us on the virtues of universal brotherhood. But it is hard enough to overcome selfishness; harder still to overcome ties of family and tribe and nation. How are we to feel for all humanity?
Our efforts to institutionalize universalism have been disappointing. The UN, intended to be the parliament of man, has instead become a cockpit of rivalries that often sharpen, not lessen, feelings of national and racial hostility. Our other famous attempt, the Olympics, has also fallen short. The opening and closing ceremonies can be sweet celebrations of our oneness. But sandwiched in between are two weeks of doping, cheating, clawing and jousting to earn you a flag-draped victory lap and gold to bring home to the tribe.
These noble failures suggest that self-conscious attempts at creating community simply don’t work. Our divisions are too profound. True expressions of our common humanity are more spontaneous, if infrequent. And they generally emerge in response to two kinds of phenomena: disaster and discovery.
It is a particular kind of disaster, however, that moves us to recognize global solidarity. Epidemics are simply too slow. And localized catastrophes, such as the mudslides and floods in the US last week or even the Iranian earthquake of 2003, are usually too parochial in their victimization to catch the attention of all humanity. It takes a multicontinental cataclysm—instantaneous, catastrophic, widely spread—to shake the world from its self-absorption. The tsunami that destroyed thousands of lives from Sumatra to Somalia engendered an instant, near-universal outpouring of concern, shared grief and charitable giving. Ronald Reagan once startled the UN by suggesting in a speech that humanity would unite and forget its petty divisions if we were attacked from outer space. This elicited widespread head scratching, but the point was unassailable: External threats do exactly that—not little green men but forces closer to home, forces we often assume we have tamed.
Comes the tsunami and we realize to our horror that Nature has merely to shrug, to flick a finger, as it were, and hundreds of thousands of us are broken, entire nations thrown into chaos and grief. It is the ultimate reminder of our common fragility, of just how precarious our species’ ridiculously brief sojourn on this earth really is.
The other, more ennobling reminder of our common humanity is scientific discovery, which reveals not our vulnerability but our genius, not our weakness but our glory. The most universal of these inspirations have come, literally, from outer space, from our few distant glimpses of the uniqueness of our tiny earthly habitat and the brilliance of the species that could contrive to get up, out and beyond it. Indeed, the birth of our modern “whole earth” consciousness can be traced to a single act of exploration: Apollo 8’s circumnavigation of the moon and the astonishing photo—“Earthrise,” that vision of a little blue planet—that it sent back.
Just two days before the tsunami, the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn received instructions from this frail little species three planetary orbits away, and proceeded to detach and launch its Huygens probe to fly suicidally down to the giant moon Titan—measuring, sensing, learning and teaching through its final descent. All for one purpose: to satisfy the hunger for knowledge of a species three-quarters of a billion miles away.
Huygens carried no passengers, only the product of thousands of years of the accumulated knowledge of a race of beings that is, until proved otherwise, the crown of all creation. Even as Earth is tossing us about like toys, our own little proxies, a satellite and a probe, dare disturb Saturn and Titan. What a piece of work is man!
And yet how frail. The most famous reaction to disaster is that poignant cry from a radio reporter sent to cover the landing of the airship Hindenburg in New Jersey in 1937. Suddenly it goes up in flames. Bodies burn and fall pitiably. “Oh, the humanity!” Everyone has heard the cry, but it is puzzling. It has little logical meaning. It is but the primal expression of anguished fellow feeling for the fate of unknown human forms falling from the sky. At times like that we literally feel the humanity.
And at one other time too. Beside the sorrow of our frail humanity there is also the glory of our genius. Amid the shock and grief at our common helplessness before a cruel ocean, there is also this: when Huygens sent back those wondrous pictures from the surface of Titan this past Friday, we were reminded once again of our stubborn little common human greatness.
Time, January 24, 2005
The news from physics is not good. It seems that an X-ray satellite has detected evidence of enormous amounts of “dark matter” in the far reaches of space, perhaps enough to stop the expansion of the universe and cause its eventual extinction in the Big Crunch, a spectacular reversal of our birth in the Big Bang.
Some people find this news depressing because it foretells the End. Not me. After all, the expanding universe is no picnic either. It too ends—in a state of infinite, frozen dissipation. Given the choice between fire and ice, I hold with those who prefer the world to end in fire.
What I find more depressing than the prospect of the End is the epistemological void illuminated by these flashes from physics. Front-page physics is noteworthy less for the new knowledge it imparts the layman than for the invincible ignorance in which it leaves him.
What, after all, is “dark matter”? The New York Times blithely, and no doubt accurately, refers to it as “invisible material of an unknown kind.” What possibly can that mean? The fact that there might be 10 times as much of this invisible stuff around as ordinary chairs and tables does not make it any more solid or comprehensible.
Consider another recent piece of physics news: 315 scientists using a massive atom smasher whose detector alone cost $65 million were unable to find the squarks and gluinos required for the theory of “supersymmetry.” Interesting news, with serious policy implications—Congress is planning to spend $8.2 billion on an even stronger squark-hunting gizmo in Texas. But what does it mean? Supersymmetry—a way to unify theories of electromagnetism, the weak and strong nuclear forces—is even more opaque a notion than dark matter, which at least has some analogue in magic.
Why is physics so difficult? The reason is that at its heart is math of astonishing complexity. One either devotes a lifetime to penetrating the math—two winters ago I worked my way through a 700-page calculus text in preparation for an assault on Everest, before capitulating in exhaustion at Base Camp 1—or one tries the shortcut of metaphor.
Problem is, metaphor doesn’t work. Stephen Hawking’s best-selling A Brief History of Time is all metaphor and, as anyone who has read it can tell you (I read it twice), entirely incomprehensible. A recently done film version of the book is engaging but even less illuminating.
Or take James Gleick’s wonderful new biography of the great physicist Richard Feynman. Gleick, perhaps the country’s finest science writer, is a master of metaphor. (My favorite: batches of cards in a primitive computing system passing each other “like impatient golfers playing through.”) He illuminates for us the life of a man who for amusement picked the locks of his co-workers’ safes while working on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. But what is there to understand about Feynman’s theory of quantum electrodynamics, which won him the Nobel Prize in 1965? When asked by newsmen about his discovery, Feynman was tempted to say: “Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn’t be worth the Nobel Prize.” In fact, even Gleick cannot really tell you in a book.
Why is any of this important? For reasons of policy, obviously—$8 billion is real money. But even more for reasons of theology. In the age of science, physics is a form of revelation. For Einstein it was the purest form: God’s rulebook. Einstein saw in the order and the beauty of the universe evidence of a benign Intelligence. Other physicists have been driven to contrary conclusions. It was said of the great physicist and atheist Paul Dirac, “There is no God, and Dirac is His prophet.” It would be nice for ordinary mortals to be able to mediate between these views, or even to understand them. But they remain impenetrable to laymen.
The layman’s only comfort is that just as he cannot penetrate physics, physics cannot penetrate theology. “It seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation,” writes astronomer Robert Jastrow at the close of his book God and the Astronomers. “For the scientist…the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
Jastrow is a scientist with, one might say, a layman’s appreciation of the mystery of physics, its deeper meaning being as hidden from the physicist as the underlying equations are from the layman. He puts his hopes in a current NASA experiment listening for signs of sentient life in the universe. He calculates that any intelligence capable of signaling us must be millions, perhaps billions of years more advanced than us. Enough time, Jastrow reckons, to have worked out, for the sharing, the theological conundrums that bedevil us.
So he proposes his own shortcut to true knowledge: Check the mail. Got a better idea?
The Washington Post, January 8, 1993
Fifty years ago this week, America was shaken out of technological complacency by a beeping 180-pound aluminum ball orbiting overhead. Sputnik was a shock because we had always assumed that Russia was nothing but a big, lumbering and all-brawn bear. He could wear down the Nazis and produce mountains of steel but had none of our savvy or sophistication. Then one day we wake up and he has beaten us into space, placing overhead the first satellite to orbit Earth since God placed the moon where it could give us lovely sailing tides.
At the time, all thoughts were about the Soviets overwhelming us technologically. But the panic turned out to be unwarranted. Sputnik was not subtle science. The Soviets were making up for their inability to miniaturize nuclear warheads—something that does require sophistication—by developing massive rockets. And they had managed to develop one just massive enough to hurl a ball into Earth orbit.
We had no idea how lucky we were with Sputnik. The subsequent panic turned out to be an enormous boon. The fear of falling behind the Communists induced the federal government to pour a river of money into science and math education. The result was a vast cohort of scientists who gave us not only Apollo and the moon, but the sinews of the information age—for example, ARPA (established just months after Sputnik) created ARPANET, which became the internet—that have ensured American technological dominance to this day.
There was another lucky outcome of Sputnik. Two years earlier, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had proposed “Open Skies,” under which the United States and Russia would permit spy-plane overflights so each would know the other’s military capabilities. The idea was to reduce mutual uncertainty and strengthen deterrence. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev rejected the idea out of hand.
The advent of the orbiting satellite circumvented the objection. By 1960, we had launched our first working spy satellite. But our greatest luck was the fact that the Soviets got to space first. Sputnik orbiting over the United States—and Eisenhower never protesting a violation of US sovereignty—established forever the principle that orbital space is not national territory but is as free and open as the high seas. Had we beaten the Russians into orbit—and we were only a few months behind—Khrushchev might very well have protested our presence over sovereign Soviet territory and reserved the right to one day (the technology was still years away) shoot us down.
Sputnik and the space age it launched had one other curious, wholly unexpected effect. Before Sputnik, while still dreaming about outer space in science fiction, we always assumed that one step would create the hunger for the next—ever outward from Earth orbit to the moon to Mars and beyond.
Not so. It took only 12 years to go from Sputnik to the moon, which we jumped about on for a brief interlude and then, amazingly, abandoned.
There are technological, budgetary and political reasons to explain this. But the most profound is psychological. It’s cold out there. In the Shadow of the Moon is a magnificent new documentary of the remembrances of some of those very few human beings who have actually gone to the moon. They talk, as you’d expect, about the wonder and beauty and grandeur of the place. But some also recall the coldness of that desolation. One astronaut tells how on the moon’s surface he was seized with the realization that he and his crewmate were utterly alone on an entire world.
On Earth, you can be wandering a forbidding desert but always with the hope that there might be something human over the horizon. On the moon there is nothing but dust and rock, forever. And then—just about all the astronauts talk about this—you look up and see this beautiful blue marble, warm and fragile, hanging in the black lunar sky. And you long for home.
The astronauts brought back that image in the famous photo “Earthrise”—and, with it, that feeling of longing. That iconic image did not just help spur the environmental movement. With surpassing irony, it created at the very dawn of the space age a longing not for space but for home.
This is perhaps to be expected for a 200,000-year-old race of beings leaving its crib for the first time. We will, however, outgrow that fear. It was 115 years from Columbus to the Jamestown colony. It will take about that same span of time for a new generation—ours is too bound to Earth—to go out and not look back.
The Washington Post, October 5, 2007
We need a pick-me-up. Amid the vandalizing of Palmyra, the imminent extinction of the northern white rhino, the disarray threatening Europe’s most ambitious attempt ever at peaceful unification—amid plague and pestilence and, by God, in the middle of Shark Week—where can humanity turn for uplift?
Meet New Horizons, arriving at Pluto in five days. Small and light, the fastest spacecraft ever launched, it left Earth with such velocity that it shot past our moon in nine hours. A speeding bullet the size of a Steinway, it has flown nine and a half years to the outer edges of the solar system.
To Pluto, the now-demoted “dwarf planet” that lives beyond the Original Eight in the far distant “third zone” of the solar system—the Kuiper Belt, an unimaginably huge ring of rocks and ice and sundry debris where the dwarf is king.
After three billion miles, New Horizons will on Tuesday shoot right through Pluto’s mini-planetary system of five moons, the magnificently named Charon, Styx, Nix, Hydra and Kerberos.
Why through? Because, while the other planets lie on roughly the same plane, Pluto and its moon system stick up at an angle to that plane like a giant archery target. New Horizons gets one pass, going straight by the bull’s eye. No orbiting around, no lingering for months or even years to photograph and study.
No mulligans. And no navigating. Can’t do that when it takes four and a half hours for a message from Earth to arrive. This is a preprogrammed, single-take, nine-day deal.
For what? First, for the science, the coming avalanche of new knowledge. Remember: We didn’t even know there was a Pluto until 85 years ago when astronomer Clyde Tombaugh found a strange tiny dot moving across the star field.
Today, we still know practically nothing. In fact, two of the five moons were not discovered until after New Horizons was launched. And yet next week we will see an entirely new world come to life. “We’re not planning to rewrite any textbooks,” said principal investigator Alan Stern in a splendid New York Times documentary on the mission. “We’re planning to write them from scratch.”
Then there’s the romance. The Pluto fly-by caps a half-century of solar system exploration that has yielded staggering new wonders. Such as Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, with its vast subterranean ocean under a crust of surface ice, the most inviting potential habitat for extraterrestrial life that human beings will ever reach.
Yes, ever. Promising exoplanets—the ones circling distant stars that we deduce might offer a Goldilocks zone suitable for water-based life—are being discovered by the week. But they are unreachable. The journey to even the nearest would, at New Horizons speed, take 280,000 years. Even mere communication would be absurdly difficult. A single exchange of greetings—“Hi there,” followed by “Back at you, brother”—would take a generation.
It’s the galactic version of the old Trappist monastery joke where every seven years one monk at one meal is allowed one remark. A young novice arrives and after seven years a monk stands up at dinner and says: “The soup is cold.”
Seven years of silence. Then another monk stands and says: “The bread is stale.”
Seven years later, the now-aging novice rises and says: “If you don’t stop this bickering, I’m outta here.”
Which is what a conversation with Klingons would be like, except with longer intervals. Which is why we prefer to scour our own solar system. And for more than just the science, more than just the romance. Here we are, upright bipeds with opposable thumbs, barely down from the trees, until yesterday unable to fly, to communicate at a distance, to reproduce a sound or motion or even an image—and even today barely able to manage the elementary decencies of civilization—taking close-up pictures and chemical readings of a mysterious world nine and a half years away.
One final touch. Every ounce of superfluous weight has been stripped from New Horizons to give it more speed and pack more instruments. Yet there was one concession to poetry. New Horizons is carrying some of Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes. After all, he found the dot. Not only will he fly by his netherworldly discovery, notes Carter Emmart of the American Museum of Natural History, he will become the first human being to have his remains carried beyond the solar system.
For the wretched race of beings we surely are, we do, on occasion, manage to soar.
The Washington Post, July 10, 2015
Fractured and divided as we are, on one thing we can agree: 2015 was a miserable year. The only cheer was provided by Lincoln Chafee and the Pluto flyby (two separate phenomena), as well as one seminal aeronautical breakthrough.
On December 21, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, after launching 11 satellites into orbit, returned its 15-story booster rocket, upright and intact, to a landing pad at Cape Canaveral. That’s a $60 million mountain of machinery—recovered. (The traditional booster rocket either burns up or disappears into some ocean.)
The reusable rocket has arrived. Arguably, it arrived a month earlier when Blue Origin, a privately owned outfit created by Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos, launched and landed its own booster rocket, albeit for a suborbital flight. But whether you attribute priority to Musk or Bezos, the two events together mark the inauguration of a new era in spaceflight.
Musk predicts that the reusable rocket will reduce the cost of accessing space a hundredfold. This depends, of course, on whether the wear and tear and stresses of the launch make the refurbishing prohibitively expensive. Assuming it’s not, and assuming Musk is even 10% right, reusability revolutionizes the economics of spaceflight.
Which both democratizes and commercializes it. Which means space travel has now slipped the surly bonds of government—presidents, Congress, NASA bureaucracies. Its future will now be driven far more by a competitive marketplace with its multiplicity of independent actors, including deeply motivated, financially savvy and visionary entrepreneurs.
To be sure, the enterprise is not entirely free of government. After all, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket landed on a Cape Canaveral pad formerly used to launch Air Force Atlas rockets. Moreover, initial financing for these ventures already depends in part on NASA contracts, such as resupplying the space station.
That, however, is not much different from the growth of aviation a century ago. It hardly lived off air-show tickets or Channel-crossing prize money. What really propelled the infant industry was government contracts. For useful things like mail—and bomb—delivery.
The first and most visible consequence of the new entrepreneurial era will be restoring America as a spacefaring nation. Yes, I know we do spectacular robotic explorations. But our ability to toss humans into space disappeared when NASA retired the space shuttle—without a replacement.
To get an astronaut into just low Earth orbit, therefore, we have to hitch a ride on Russia’s Soyuz with its 1960s technology. At $82 million a pop. Yet, today, two private companies already have contracts with NASA to send astronauts to the space station as soon as 2017.
The real prize, however, lies beyond Earth orbit. By now, everyone realizes that the space station was a colossal mistake, a white elephant in search of a mission. Its main contribution is to study the biological effects of long-term weightlessness. But we could have done that in Skylab, a modest space station that our political betters decided four decades ago to abandon.
With increasing privatization, such decisions will no longer be exclusively Washington’s. When President Obama came into office, the plan was to return to the moon by 2020. A year later, he decided we should go to an asteroid instead. Why? Who knows.
Today future directions are being set by private companies with growing technical experience and competing visions. Musk is fixated on colonizing Mars, Bezos on seeing millions of people living and working in space and Richard Branson on space tourism by way of Virgin Galactic (he has already sold 700 tickets to ride at $250,000 each). And Moon Express, another private enterprise, is not even interested in hurling about clumsy, air-breathing humans. It is bent on robotic mining expeditions to the moon. My personal preference is a permanent manned moon base, which would likely already exist had our politicians not decided to abandon the moon in the early 1970s.
We have no idea which plan is more likely to succeed and flourish. But the beauty of privatization is that we don’t get just one shot at it. Our trajectory in space will now be the work of a functioning market of both ideas and commerce. It no longer will hinge on the whims of only tangentially interested politicians.
Space has now entered the era of the Teslas, the Edisons and the Wright brothers. From now on, they will be doing more and more of the driving. Which means we are actually—finally—going somewhere again.
The Washington Post, January 1, 2016
The remembrances of the Space Shuttle Columbia astronauts were deeply moving, dignified in their restraint. The president’s eulogy at the Johnson Space Center recalled each of them individually, gave the simple reassurance that “America’s space program will go on,” and modestly offered the “respect and gratitude of the people of the United States.”
The mood of grief felt so keenly upon hearing the news passed far more quickly than one would have expected—and far more quickly than it did after the Challenger accident. Of course, Challenger was the first fatal in-flight accident in the history of the American space program—the kind of thing you might imagine but are never quite prepared for. Challenger was accompanied by feelings of unreality. Columbia was accompanied by feelings of sad déjà vu, rather crudely captured by the Newsweek headline “Not Again.”
There was, however, a deeper, subtler reason that the sorrow was somewhat muted, even mitigated. The Columbia astronauts died on their way back, not on their way there. The unstated theme of the president’s memorial address was that these people had fulfilled their dream, and died doing it. Not died trying to do it, on the way to doing it, failing to do it. Columbia died coming home. Death here had an Odyssean quality, and thus a hint of redemption. President Reagan’s eulogy for the Challenger astronauts spoke of having “slipped the surly bonds of Earth.” Challenger had the additional tragedy of never having done so.
In the longer run, however, a nagging realization will temper the redemptive sense of a mission nearly accomplished. The Columbia astronauts, as President Bush pointed out, were only minutes away from home. But what did the rest of the trip amount to? That, it seems to me, is the deepest part of this tragedy: the waste. For, whatever the joy felt by the astronauts during their 16 days aloft, one has to ask what they were doing up there in the first place or, more precisely, what we were doing sending them up in such a fragile vehicle on such a hazardous journey.
It turns out that their 16-day mission was spent conducting scientific experiments, most of which are relatively trivial, and many of which could have been done either on the space station or by unmanned spacecraft. That’s all Columbia did, or could do (with the notable exception of repairing Hubble). That, and running cargo to and from the space station, is all any of the shuttles do. And, as we now realize, at astonishing peril. Challenger at first and now Columbia are stirring us to finally face the central truth about our current manned space program: the enormous imbalance between risk and reward.
The most difficult part of space travel is the first 150 miles escaping gravity and navigating the atmosphere. Beyond that, space travel gets relatively easy. And it is also beyond that that space travel gets glorious—and interesting. Once you escape the atmosphere, you no longer have to fight the heat and friction and gravitational stresses that can tear spacecraft to pieces. You no longer need absolute precision to balance all the forces necessary to keep catastrophe at bay. An astronaut who had flown on three shuttle missions averred in a post-Columbia interview that on every flight he was terrified on takeoff, apprehensive on landing, but calm and relaxed in space. And yet, since Apollo, we have inexplicably reduced the entire manned space program to endlessly traversing the most terror-inducing, and yet most scientifically and spiritually mundane, part of space.
Within hours of Columbia’s crash, the first recourse of critics was to pin the tragedy on inadequate funding. This is probably right, but how could the funding ever be adequate for such a program? It is hugely expensive—in large part to cover minimal safety requirements—and yet has no appeal to the popular imagination. And popular imagination determines how much of the country’s resources go to projects that are at root romantic rather than utilitarian.
No one had ever heard of Columbia or its crew before the disaster. That is not a failure of the popular imagination. That is a failure of those—politicians and scientists—who have reduced the manned space program to spinning around in zero gravity in a space station, and sending a space truck (a beautiful and complicated one to be sure, but a truck, nonetheless) back and forth to service it.
This is an enormous risk for very little payoff. As I wrote in The Weekly Standard three years ago (“On to Mars,” January 31, 2000), the entire shuttle/station idea was a wrong turn. The space station, for all of its beauty, is a failure. It does not serve as a waystation and landing base on the way to the moon and Mars—as it was originally envisioned a generation ago. No one even pretends that it is doing serious science. Under the Clinton administration it metamorphosed into yet another project in “interdependence,” yet another institution to foster cooperative activity with the Russians and the Europeans.
Well, there’s nothing wrong with cooperative activity with the Russians and the Europeans (in moderation), but not at the absurd cost of the space station and the absurd risk of the space shuttle.
What to do? Should we shut them down completely? No. There’s too much already invested. And we do have contractual obligations to the other countries that signed up in good faith for the station. But not a penny more for its expansion. We should do just enough to sustain it with its three-astronaut crew, the minimum required to keep it going. We should forget about expanding it to house the seven astronauts and the larger living space that were originally intended. Keep it alive for the next few years. And send the shuttle up just for changes of crew, which would require no more than two or three trips a year. We can use unmanned Russian vehicles for cargo. Why risk seven human lives to lug stuff?
Right now, the shuttle is our only vehicle for getting humans into space, and the space station is their only destination. For now, keep them on life support. We dare not let them die completely lest we lose for decades the will to do anything at all in space. But a radically toned down shuttle and space station program should be a holding action as we prepare for a return to our true destiny: leaving Earth, not spinning around it. When we take the risk of sending people through that first 150 miles of terror, of killing atmosphere and gravity, it should be worth it. It should be for going farther and deeper into the glory regions. It should be for the great journeys: returning to the moon, establishing a permanent lunar presence and sending a human expedition to Mars.
What most people don’t realize is that today these things are doable. It makes a lot more sense than low Earth orbit, which is the limit of the horizon for both the shuttle and the space station. Low Earth orbit, after all, is a desert. There’s nothing there. It’s literally a vacuum. You have to support everything by hauling it up and bringing it back. On the moon and on Mars you can live off the land. There’s limited gravity to anchor you. There’s soil. And most blessedly, there’s water, which is the stuff of both life and power: oxygen for life support, hydrogen for propellant. All the necessities can be pre-positioned by machines sent ahead so that the humans can travel light. And when you get there, you can build things, mine things, find things, perhaps even grow things—at first a base, then a habitat and then ultimately a civilization.
February 2003 is not the time for a president to propose such a vast new enterprise. We have just watched our current space technology fall to Earth. Moreover, we are in economic hard times. We are in the midst of war. We have terrestrial dangers that call upon us right now. But this moment will pass. And when it does, it will be time for real leadership to point us, as John Kennedy did, upward and outward.
To glory. That, in the end, was Kennedy’s purpose. That, in the end, is the only purpose that will sustain popular support for space. Yes, then as now, there will be the usual chorus pointing out that we have problems on earth that demand our attention and resources before we go adventuring. But this complaint is disingenuous: These problems, being perennial, are a perennial excuse for going nowhere, for dreaming nothing.
The real objection comes from those who simply can’t understand why we need to venture into the void in the first place. The cheap, disgraceful answer to such an objection is to dangle Tang and Teflon and tout the great spinoffs. That misses the point and, by the way, misrepresents the facts. There’s not a crystal we will ever grow in space—no matter how perfect—that will ever justify the billions of dollars and the dozens of lives it will have cost. At this point in human history it is no more practical to go into space than it was for the Wright brothers to zip around Kitty Hawk. The plain fact is that we are not doing this for the utility but for the romance.
And that is reason enough. You and I are the improbable winners of the most miraculous intergenerational lottery: After uncounted generations of human beings, we have the unique privilege of living in a time when man has the capacity to travel to other worlds. Anyone who can remain unhumbled by the majesty of the enterprise, dead to the transcendent promise of his own time, should have his citizenship in the 21st century revoked. The rest of us need to get to work—on a new space program, revised, revived and back on course.
The Weekly Standard, February 17, 2003