9 A TIME TO HEAL

On July 21, 1969—the day the New York Times banner headline read “MEN WALK ON MOON: ASTRONAUTS LAND ON PLAIN; COLLECT ROCKS, PLANT FLAG”—the paper also provided space for reactions from several dozen notable individuals: the Dalai Lama, R. Buckminster Fuller, Jesse Jackson, Charles Lindbergh, Arthur Miller, Pablo Picasso. Some were enthusiastic, some were ambivalent, Picasso was completely uninterested. The admired historian of cities and technology Lewis Mumford was disgusted.

Five years earlier, Mumford had received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Now he felt impelled to describe the foremost scientific and technical achievements of the modern era—rockets, computers, nuclear bombs—as “direct products of war,” hyped as research and development

for military and political ends that would shrivel under rational examination and candid moral appraisal. The moon-landing program is no exception: it is a symbolic act of war, and the slogan the astronauts will carry, proclaiming that it is for the benefit of mankind, is on the same level as the Air Force’s monstrous hypocrisy—“Our Profession is Peace.”

Mumford also painted America’s Moon program as a ravenous beast, maiming or devouring all other human enterprises:

It is no accident that the climactic moon landing coincides with cutbacks in education, the bankruptcy of hospital services, the closing of libraries and museums, and the mounting defilement of the urban and natural environment, to say nothing of many other evidences of gross social failure and human deterioration.

Saying technological triumphs had brought the “moonstruck” human species to the brink of catastrophe, Mumford called out the proponents of space exploration for their duplicity in lavishing support on the “power elite” while making “the scientifically uninformed believe that a better future may await mankind on the sterile moon, or on an even more life-hostile Mars.”¹

Yet many of the world’s inhabitants derive conspicuous collateral benefits from scientific and technical advances that started life as military projects. Communications and weather satellites, GPS, medical technologies, and mobile phones help both the farmer in rural India and the surgeon in a Manhattan hospital.

As a form of protection, militarization of space might seem inevitable, even desirable, as a kind of shield for our growing orbital assets. But weaponization arrives close on the heels of militarization. On the other hand, humanity has officially embraced a peaceable space agenda. Drawn up by the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, the 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies is ambitious and inspiring. Yet who among us believes that humans will act peacefully in space? Space is not a magical place where somehow, suddenly, everybody is friendly. We remain the same species, with the same primal urges as our tribal ancestors. How about working on the peaceful uses of Earth? Once we figure those out, maybe we’ll be able to non-delusionally envision the peaceful uses of space.

One way to assess a society is to examine how it rewards or punishes those who act on primal urges, how it attempts to encourage, channel, or inhibit those urges. But is war primal? That civilization exists at all, that at any given moment most people and most nation-states are not waging war on one another, implies that we are not entirely hapless victims of an opportunistic compulsion awaiting a time to kill. We may also be capable of opportunistically seizing a time to heal.

Being a scientist, when I think of how and where and when healing could take place, I think of knowledge, rational analysis, cooperation. I think of what it would be like to live in a country—let’s call it Rationalia—in which all decisions that affect the population as a whole would flow from a single constitutional tenet: “Laws shall be based only on the weight of evidence.” Which means that where evidence is inconclusive, there can be no law.

In Rationalia, I contend, space exploration could conceivably serve as the ultimate healer, offering the high road to peace. To talk about sources of peace, you have to ask, What have been the causes, costs, and casualties of war? One is a scarcity of natural resources: oil, freshwater, salt, nitrates, ores, guano, shipworthy timber. Dwindling or interrupted access to each of these commodities has figured in past armed conflict.² So-called rare earth metals, such as yttrium, dysprosium, and neodymium—along with others that complete an entire row of the periodic table of elements—could easily join this list.

Tech sectors thrive on rare earth elements. Without them, America’s electronics, defense, and green-energy industries would implode. We wouldn’t have satellites, smartphones, lightweight laptops, jet engines, missile guidance systems, antimissile defense systems, nuclear-reactor shielding, lasers, catalytic converters, rechargeable batteries for hybrid vehicles, magnets for speakers and headphones, advanced wind turbines, LED lighting systems, MRI scans, or energy-efficient air conditioners. About 90 percent of the world’s supply currently comes from China. Other sources, in descending order of productivity, are Australia, Russia, and India. Until 1989 the United States—specifically, the open-pit Mountain Pass Mine in California—was the world’s main producer. But after supplying plenty of europium for the red tones in color TVs while leaking radioactive wastewater into the surroundings for a decade or two, the mine stopped operations and eventually declared bankruptcy. China offered a cheaper alternative, forcing the United States to sell off its stockpiles. Now every industrialized country is in thrall to Chinese suppliers, who are acutely aware of the economic and strategic implications of being the dominant supplier of scarce resources with inelastic demand.³

But there’s a remedy. What’s contested on Earth because of scarcity is typically common in space. Selected asteroids contain unlimited quantities of metals and minerals. Comets have unlimited quantities of water. And solar energy is boundless in the empty space between planets. Access to space gives us access to these resources. Even if control of that access rests in the hands of people you’d hate to be in control of anything, the resources themselves will not be scarce—and it’s scarcity that breeds conflict.

Asteroids are fragments of planets that didn’t stay planetized. They start their lives through accretion. Debris collects in space, and any speck that’s slightly bigger than the surrounding specks will have more gravity and attract more debris. Soon you’ll have blobs rather than just specks. A big blob gets bigger faster than a small blob. Meanwhile, a lot of energy is getting deposited on what we would now call a protoplanet, as the kinetic energy from other colliding specks and blobs accumulates. For a couple hundred million years during the late childhood of our solar system, a period sensibly called the Late Heavy Bombardment, those collisions were significant and continual. With kinetic energy converting entirely to heat on impact, the deposited energy renders the protoplanet molten. And when you’re molten, dense ingredients (such as pure heavy metals) fall toward your middle, and less dense ingredients (such as silicates) rise to your surface. By this process, Nature pre-sifts heavy things from light things, which geologists label with a six-syllable word: differentiation.

All of Earth was once molten. That’s why it has an iron-rich core, containing abundant quantities of other metals that are rare on the surface.⁴ Rare earth metals are not actually rare. They’re simply not found in any significant concentration in Earth’s crust, and we have no access to Earth’s core, where they lie in abundance. The deepest we’ve ever drilled is less than one five-hundredth the distance to the center of our planet, and the core extends to half the planet’s radius.

Eventually every molten object cools and solidifies. But if a big, fast-moving object then slams into it, you get a shattered, scattered field of pre-sifted space debris. That’s how you get entire asteroids made of pure rock and others of pure metal. What matters to the future space miner is that some asteroids came from a protoplanet’s shattered differentiated core, and they’re packed with rare earth metals, as well as other metals we deem precious, including gold, silver, platinum, iridium, and palladium.

Once you have access to multiple sources of rare earth metals, you no longer have to worry about anybody’s unilateral control of the strategic supply. Yes, Space Prospectors No. 1—a country or a private company—will be the first to start mining the nearest rare-earth-laden asteroid and will therefore control that part of the supply. But so what? Space Prospectors No. 2 will just plan to get to a different asteroid and start mining that one. At which time normal economic and political forces begin to kick in. SP1, the pioneer, will not want to see anyone starting up a mine on a different asteroid. They’ll want the rest of us to buy the rare earths they’ve mined. So they’ll price their product at the point where it’s cheaper for everyone to buy SP1 metals than to send their own missions to other asteroids. If SP1 goes above that price point, the rest of us will just go out and mine our own asteroids.

Unquestionably, asteroid mining will one day be a trillion-dollar industry, even if the vast increase in supply depresses the high prices at which rare earths are currently traded. As the price of highly useful goods drops, the number of affordable applications tends to grow. In the shorter run, however, since asteroid mining won’t start tomorrow—although startups are multiplying, and the Finnish Meteorological Institute, for instance, is proposing a fleet of solar-wind-powered nanosatellites to collect data on the composition of several hundred asteroids—we’ll have to come up with other solutions.⁵ Maybe someone will invent a smartphone that doesn’t need dysprosium. Maybe someone else will finally invent a storage mechanism in lieu of batteries for stockpiling solar energy.

Asteroids aren’t the only small celestial bodies that can bring us a little more peace and security. Some comets contain as much water as the entire Indian Ocean, and it’s not saltwater; do a bit of filtering, and you get freshwater. The way to snare a comet is to match orbits with it and break off a piece, which should be very easy. Comets are loosely held together, like snowballs made of dry snow. They look for excuses to break apart. Even the gentlest nudge from the tidal forces of a passing planet will do. Once you’ve grabbed a piece of the comet, you could put it in orbit around the site where the need exists—Earth, the Moon, Mars, wherever—and intermittently go up and grab iceberg-size chunks of it. Of course, you’ll have to figure out how to accomplish all that, but you’d be working on engineering problems, not scientific ones. Any clever engineer would delight in being tasked to solve them.

There you have it: one vision of a future avenue to peace and healing. In the centuries-long alliance between warfighters and skywatchers, the two sides have more often been in sync than at odds. Now astrophysicists and space scientists—heirs of the skywatchers of yore—may hold the power to erase a perennial rationale for war.

But we’re not there yet. For millennia, war between nations, regions, religious factions, clans, or generally disagreeing or competing humans seems to have been always on the horizon or under way. Yet despite its ubiquity and persistence, “we (or at least we Americans) have forgotten the meaning of war,” wrote the noted historian Tony Judt not long before his death. “In part this is, perhaps, because the impact of war in the twentieth century, though global in reach, was not everywhere the same.” In Africa, in Europe, in Latin America, in Asia, in the Middle East, war in the last century “signified occupation, displacement, deprivation, destruction, and mass murder,” the loss of family and neighbors, homes and shops, personal safety and national autonomy. For both victors and losers, and both sides in the long strings of civil wars, the memories of horror were similar. The United States, on the other hand,

avoided all that. Americans experienced the twentieth century in a far more positive light. The U.S. was never occupied. It did not lose vast numbers of citizens, or huge swaths of national territory, as a result of occupation or dismemberment. Although humiliated in neocolonial wars (in Vietnam and now in Iraq), it has never suffered the other consequences of defeat. Despite the ambivalence of its most recent undertakings, most Americans still feel that the wars their country has fought were “good wars.” The USA was enriched rather than impoverished by its role in the two world wars and by their outcome[, and thus] for many American commentators and policymakers the message of the last century is that war works. . . . For Washington, war remains an option—in this case the first option. For the rest of the developed world it has become a last resort.⁶

If an all-out space-enabled war should ever occur, it would bear no resemblance to the world wars portrayed in All Quiet on the Western Front or The Naked and the Dead or the poems of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Nor would it be like Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan. There would be no muddy, stinking trenches or sweltering, unforgiving deserts; nineteen-year-old boys would not blindly stagger through jungles half a world away; no Marine would see his buddy’s head blown half off a yard from where he crouched. True space-age war would be sanitized, emotionless, thorough, and likely brief. Nations would fail in a day.

However often American public figures proclaim their country’s prominence or dominance, the work that must be done in this century is inescapably cooperative—a point made by President Barack Obama in a speech to the UN General Assembly eight months after taking office:

[M]y responsibility is to act in the interest of my nation and my people, and I will never apologize for defending those interests. But it is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009—more than at any point in human history—the interests of nations and peoples are shared. . . . The technology we harness can light the path to peace, or forever darken it. . . .

In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game. No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold.⁷

Were this understanding—that dominance cannot be the cornerstone of security in an interconnected world—ever to take root, the resulting cooperation would not only help forestall an arms race in outer space but could also help rescue our home planet from some of the upheavals of climate change.

The Paris Agreement—the 2016 United Nations climate accord, accepted by 197 parties as of early 2018⁸—represents the first time that rigorous scientific consensus has shaped the political agenda of the world. People in power have learned that air and water molecules do not carry passports, as the American astrophysicist Carl Sagan was fond of saying. A melting glacier raises the sea level of all the world’s coastlines. Greenhouse gases generated in one area of Earth mix swiftly with air currents that carry them to all areas of Earth. Warming air and warming ocean currents do not observe national boundaries or property rights. Neither would the thousands of deadly fragments of wayward orbital debris that an attack on a satellite would produce. No longer can the inhabitants of Earth survive as a collection of tribes, each looking out for only its own members. The world itself has become a tribe.

The same day Obama spoke at the United Nations, the journal Nature published grave news about the drastically accelerated melting of ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland in 2003–2007 compared with that of the preceding decade. This was a finding by British climatologists, who based their determination on fifty million laser readings from a NASA satellite: an instance of international cooperation, in this case between allies. But adversaries, too, sometimes toss a little cooperation in with their confrontations. It’s diplomacy’s forte.

In July 2015, US–Russian relations pointed toward the dawn of Cold War 2.0. Inflammatory rhetoric had been ratcheted up in the wake of Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and Russian military incursions across the Ukrainian border. In response, the United States had led the call for Western sanctions against Russia. Yet all that bad blood did not keep Russia from sending an unmanned cargo ship packed with food, water, oxygen, and equipment to the International Space Station to do what the community of spacefaring nations needed done following the failure of three supply missions within seven months (two US failures and one Russian). Russia deployed its reliable Soyuz-U rocket—not merely because the space station’s crew consisted of two Russians and an American, not merely because Russia and America are founding partners of the ISS, but also because of the hefty sums Russia had been getting as sole provider of transport to the ISS.

Yes, it’s complicated. And yes, there’s no shortage of contradictions. But in the end, off-planet survival among spacefaring comrades can override them all.

One notable twentieth-century result of the countless alliances between astrophysics and the military is the thermonuclear fusion bomb, whose design principles arise in part from the astrophysicist’s investigations of the cosmic crucible that occupies the center of every star. A less explosive example, from our own century, is the ChemCam instrument (short for Chemistry and Camera) atop the Curiosity rover, which began trundling across Mars in August 2012. From its skybox position on the rover’s mast, ChemCam fires laser pulses at rocks and soil and then uses its spectrometer to analyze the chemical makeup of what got vaporized.

Who or what built ChemCam? The Los Alamos National Laboratory: birthplace of the atom bomb, originator of hundreds of spacecraft instruments designed for use by the military, and home to the Center for Earth and Space Science, a division of the National Security Education Center as well as a hub of support for astrophysics. Los Alamos Lab operates under the auspices of the National Nuclear Security Administration, whose mission is to maintain and protect America’s stockpile of nuclear weapons while simultaneously working to undercut the proliferation of such stockpiles elsewhere in the world. And the lab’s astrophysicists use the same supercomputer and similar software to calculate the yield from hydrogen fusion within the heart of a star that physicists use to calculate the yield of a hydrogen bomb. You’d have to look far and wide to find a clearer example of dual use.

Say you want to know what takes place during the explosion of a nuclear bomb. If you were to tabulate the many varieties of subatomic particles, and track the ways they interact and transmute into one another under controlled conditions of temperature and pressure—not to mention the particles that get created or destroyed in the process—you’d quickly realize you need more than pencil and paper. You need computers. Powerful computers.

A properly programmed computer can calculate crucial parameters for nuclear bomb design, ignition, and explosive yields, so it can predict what to expect from an experiment. Of course, “experiment” means the actual detonation of a nuclear bomb, either in a test or in warfare. During the Manhattan Project, in the 1940s, Los Alamos used mechanical calculators and early IBM punch-card tabulators to calculate atomic bomb yields. Decade by decade, as computing power increased exponentially, so too did the power to calculate and understand in detail the nuclear happenings in a nuclear explosion. And the needs of Los Alamos fostered the sustained quest to build the fastest computer in the world.

Second-generation computers of the 1960s, furnished with transistors that greatly accelerated their performance, in part made the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty possible. While later generations of computers didn’t stop the arms race, they did offer a viable way to test weapon systems without actually detonating anything. By 1998, the Los Alamos supercomputer Blue Mountain could run 1.6 trillion calculations per second. By 2009, the lab’s Roadrunner had increased that speed more than six hundredfold, to the milestone of one quadrillion calculations per second. And by late 2017, its Trinity supercomputer had racked up another factor of fourteen in computing power.⁹

We know that stars generate energy in exactly the same way that hydrogen bombs do. The difference is that the controlled nuclear fusion that happens in the star’s core is contained by the weight of the star itself, whereas in warfare the nuclear fusion is positively uncontrolled—the precise objective of a bomb. And that is why astrophysicists have long been associated with Los Alamos National Lab and its supercomputers. Picture scientists working away on opposite sides of a classified wall. On one side, you have researchers engaged in secret projects that are “responsible for enhancing national security through the military application of nuclear science.”¹⁰ On the other side, you have researchers trying to figure out how stars in the universe live and die. Each side is accessory to the other’s needs, interests, and resources.

If you seek more evidence, search the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System¹¹ for research published in 2017 whose co-authors are affiliated with Los Alamos National Laboratory. You’ll recover 102 papers. On average, that’s an astrophysics paper published every 3.6 days. And that’s the unclassified research. Next, peruse the titles of Los Alamos–affiliated papers over the years. Supernovas turn out to be a perennial favorite. Published in the year 2013, for instance, there’s “The Los Alamos Supernova Light-curve Project: Computational Methods.” In 2013–14 there’s a three-paper sequence: “Finding the First Cosmic Explosions. I. Pair-instability Supernovae,” “II. Core-collapse Supernovae,” and “III. Pulsational Pair-instability Supernovae.” For 2006 you’ll find “Modeling Supernova Shocks with Intense Lasers.” For earlier years, you’ll see titles such as “Testing Astrophysics in the Lab: Simulations with the FLASH Code” (2003) and “Gamma-Ray Bursts: The Most Powerful Cosmic Explosions” (2002).

Born in Cold War fear, the alliance between space and national security remains alive and well in the unstable geopolitical climes of the twenty-first century. And it swings on a double-hinged door.

Some alliances, however, are forced on everybody in all domains on all sides because there’s no other choice, as with the swarms of dreck passing overhead in Earth orbit and posing a volitionless threat not only to everything else circling up there but also to our wholly space-dependent way of life down here. Orbital debris is widely recognized as so grave a danger that Bill Maher, in the great American tradition of political satire—the necessary-for-survival alliance of truth, parody, pain, and healing—did a routine about it:

STAR DREK

Human beings are such slobs that, from now on, pigs must declare us the other white meat. Do you know that right now there is so much discarded trash in outer space that three times last month the International Space Station was almost hit by some useless hunk of floating metal—not unlike the International Space Station itself? So really, you’ve got to give the human race credit: only humans could visit an infinite void and leave it cluttered. Not only have we screwed up our own planet; somehow we have also managed to use up all the space in space.

Now, history shows over and over again that if the citizens of Earth put their minds to it, they can destroy anything. It doesn’t matter how remote or pristine, together, yes, we can fuck it up. The age of space exploration is only fifty years old, and we have already managed to turn the final frontier into the New Jersey Meadowlands.¹²

One place you won’t find comic relief is a US presidential commission report or a military doctrine document about national security space/milspace/counterspace. Some of the language in these things might lead a reader to assume that America’s military already has at its disposal not merely scores of dedicated satellites, which it does, but also a panoply of fully functional space weapons suitable for various kinds of confrontations, which it does not. The reader might further assume that other countries will shortly have such weapons too and that all sides are ready, willing, and able to deploy them. Not true.

Back in 2009, Major Scott A. Weston, USAF, published a piece in the Air Force’s own Air & Space Power Journal in which he seeks to separate the factual from the fictional regarding prospects for space war. The major, who envisions a sky filled with hazardous debris under any scenario of overt space conflict, dismantles “the very concept of a space Pearl Harbor.” That specter was raised repeatedly in the January 2001 final report of the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld. Two pages into the executive summary, the report asserts that an attack on American space assets during a crisis or conflict is not improbable. “If the U.S. is to avoid a ‘Space Pearl Harbor,’ it needs to take seriously the possibility of an attack on U.S. space systems.”¹³ Weston emphatically disagrees:

If a conflict occurs in the next five to 10 years, the long acquisition process for space systems and limited space-launch schedules will confine the main space systems involved to those now fielded. . . .

Many works about space weapons quickly move from what the United States and its adversaries can do now to what they could possibly do soon, principally because few fielded terrestrial weapons can attack space assets and because no declared space-based attack assets exist. We could probably field a few promising technologies rapidly in wartime conditions, but as former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld commented, “You have to go to war with the army you have, not the army you want.” Fielded weapons include only the ones tested and turned over to military forces trained to employ them as an integrated part of battlefield forces. . . .

The United States has just one counterspace weapon—an electronic countercommunication system specifically designed and fielded with the intent of disrupting enemy satellite communications. . . .

After all the hype about space warfare and space weapons, an examination of currently fielded forces capable of direct counterspace operations against satellites clearly shows that few countries can conduct this type of warfare. Most threats envisioned in the US military’s space doctrine simply do not exist in an operationally deployed form.¹⁴

That last contention apparently still holds.

The opening sentence of an eight-page white paper produced by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Global Security in September 2015 reads: “Today’s space architectures, designed and deployed under conditions more reflective of nuclear warfighting deterrence than conventional warfighting sustainability, lack, in general, the robustness that would normally be considered mandatory in such vital warfighting services.”¹⁵ Recast into everyday English, this is a complaint that America can’t readily wage a space war.

Deep within the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal 2017, we discover that Congress’s findings as of December 2016 included:

“The advantages of the United States in national security space are now threatened to an unprecedented degree by growing and serious counterspace capabilities of potential foreign adversaries, and the space advantages of the United States must be protected.”
“The Department of Defense has recognized the threat and has taken initial steps necessary to defend space, however the organization and management may not be strategically postured to fully address this changed domain of operations over the long term.”
“Space elements provide critical capabilities to all of the Armed Forces in the joint fight, however the disparate activities throughout the Department have no single leader that is empowered to make decisions affecting the space forces of the Department.”¹⁶

Again, in everyday English: US dominance in space is a thing of the past, and the future defense of US space assets will require restructuring of the military.

Following the high point of the Apollo program’s Moon landings, there’s been an enduring chasm between rhetoric and realization, between grandiose mandate and inadequate follow-through—a lot of PR and not much implementation. For more than a decade, US space policy was shaped by the combative tone of the Rumsfeld Commission’s final report, which crystallized a view of outer space as a potential battleground. Notwithstanding some twenty occurrences of the words “peace” or “peaceful” in the report, its stance is anything but:

“The Commissioners believe the U.S. Government should vigorously pursue the capabilities . . . to ensure that the President will have the option to deploy weapons in space to deter threats to and, if necessary, defend against attacks on U.S. interests.”
“In the coming period, the U.S. will conduct operations to, from, in and through space in support of its national interests both on earth and in space.”
“Unlike weapons from aircraft, land forces or ships, space missions initiated from earth or space could be carried out with little transit, information or weather delay. Having this capability would give the U.S. a much stronger deterrent and, in a conflict, an extraordinary military advantage.”¹⁷

This report, followed a few weeks later by the start of Rumsfeld’s stint as President George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, sounded the alarm bell abroad in somewhat the same way as have the campaign comments, acerbic tweets, and unrestrained threats of nuclear escalation made more recently by President Donald J. Trump.¹⁸ The director of the Arms Control Program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, for instance, noted in 2003, “We have seen some explicit moves in the United States in recent years in preparing for space wars,” including directives to the military “to engage in organization, training and equipment for swift, continuous, offensive and defensive space operations” and initiatives for the corporate development of “weapons for offensive space operations.” He concluded that “US decision makers prefer war preparation in space rather than peaceful approaches” and “may believe that the US can certainly win a space war.”¹⁹

Nobody can certainly win a space war, just as nobody can certainly win a war fought with nuclear weapons. Do you declare victory after all nukes have reached their targets, and you’ve got fewer incinerated cities than your enemy does? After almost two decades of the proliferation of both civilian and military space efforts by a number of countries, Rumsfeldian–Trumpian truculence on the part of the United States seems misplaced.²⁰ As national security specialist Joan Johnson-Freese has written, “If technology could offer the United States a way to ‘control’ space, then pursuing that course would make sense. But it does not. Politicians do not want to hear that because they want to believe otherwise.”²¹ Nor do defense corporations want them to believe otherwise. As mandates, “space situational awareness,” “freedom of action in space,” “maintaining space superiority,” and “resilience of space architecture” yield reliable profits.

Eventually, though, in one form or another, reality will intervene: economic, political, environmental, social, physical. When that happens, the United States will almost certainly be forced to adopt a more peaceable persona, simply because it cannot—nor can any other country—achieve the degree of space superiority, let alone space control, regularly envisioned by its military strategists not so very long ago.²² America in the foreseeable future is unlikely to satisfy such aspirations, and many in the military already acknowledge this.²³ As a result, mastering the intricacies of calm coexistence will probably show up on the agenda well before the fruits of extractive forays to comets and asteroids succeed in quelling some of the salient sources of international tension.

In the meantime, as you’d expect, people who are convinced that militarism does not promote national security or a safer world are not sitting on their hands waiting for a spontaneously generated peace or optimal conditions for a multilateral treaty on space weapons. Brian Weeden, a former Air Force officer with the US Strategic Command’s Joint Space Operations Center, has been pushing for more easily achievable moves—the demilitarization and internationalization of space situational awareness, for instance. The Council of the European Union has come up with a code of space conduct that stresses safety and sustainability. A Canadian–Australian–Chinese–American partnership has been publishing an annual Space Security Index since 2004. A raft of civil society organizations are each doing their bit to keep space from becoming another combat zone.²⁴

Laudable goals. But at present we’re uncomfortably close to open season up there in near-Earth space. The old two-superpower spacescape is long gone. So, too, is the vision of America as the space hegemon. Multiple smaller nations and private companies are becoming spacefarers. New projects and problems keep presenting themselves: potentially profitable mining ventures, lucrative space tourism, an increasingly crowded geostationary Earth orbit for communications satellites, maneuverable satellites that could conceivably be used as attack vehicles, launch services for sale by competing countries, insufficient coverage in the five existing UN space treaties of issues relevant to private ventures, frequent but legally mushy invocation of the “global commons,” the reawakened nightmare of nuclear escalation and proliferation, everybody’s growing reliance on satellite capabilities. Space law does not enshrine a single firm definition of “space weapon.” There are no recognized borders marking territories in space. There’s no single entity, governmental or otherwise, that holds the mandate to keep order in space. The potential for both unprecedented conflict and unprecedented cooperation is considerable. Some of those who diagnose the state of national security advise diplomacy first, technology next, and a big dose of proactive prevention. Others point out that true space security is not about foregrounding the interests of particular countries or corporations, but the security and sustainability of outer space for all.²⁵

Among the three zones of Earth orbit—low, medium, and geosynchronous—you’ll find most space telescopes, Hubble included, circling in the low zone, LEO, between 250 and 400 miles above Earth’s surface. At these accessible altitudes, treasured orbital assets are vulnerable to attack by adversaries. But low Earth orbit is hardly the only zone of exploration available to the modern astrophysicist. The nature of the universe also reveals itself to the telescopes and probes we launch into the uncrowded, uncontested regions of deep space. And this is where full-spectrum collaboration abounds.

Modern astrophysics is unlike most other sciences. The collective objects of astrophysical affection sail far above everyone’s head. They do not sit within the borders of one or even several countries—at least not until nations claim ownership of planets. Multiple researchers, scattered across the globe and hailing from historically conflicting nation-states, can study the same object at the same time with similar or complementary tools and telescopes, whether those instruments are based on the ground, circling a few hundred miles above Earth, or orbiting in deep space. Scientists’ urge to collaborate transcends religion, culture, and politics, because in space there is no religion, culture, or politics—only the receding boundary of our ignorance and the advancing frontier of our cosmic discovery.

One of our chief tools has been the Hubble Space Telescope, by far the most fertile scientific instrument ever built. Since its launch in 1990, Hubble has yielded more than fifteen thousand research papers, written by collaborators in nearly every country of the world where astrophysicists reside, and those papers have generated three-quarters of a million (and counting) citations in peer-reviewed journals.²⁶ Today Hubble has many extraordinary cousins, each hosting international collaborators.

What things wondrous and strange have these astrophysicists discovered?

Researchers from Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States have found a colossal wave of hot gas—200,000 light-years wide, twice the width of the Milky Way, and so torrid it glows copiously in X-rays—that has been barreling through the supermassive Perseus cluster of galaxies for several billion years, caused by gravitational discombobulations from a smaller cluster grazing Perseus as it journeyed through space.

A team of two dozen researchers—from Australia, France, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, led by an astrophysicist from the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics—has identified a promising exoplanetary candidate for alien life: LHS 1140B, a rocky, metal-cored planet a bit bigger than Earth that orbits in the habitable zone of a cool star and quite possibly has retained its atmosphere.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)—a collaboration of more than a thousand scientists from more than a hundred institutions dispersed across eighteen countries—has detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes billions of light-years away.

A huge team from Belgium, France, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, led by an astrophysicist from the University of Liège in Belgium, has identified a system of seven Earth-sized, probably rocky exoplanets—TRAPPIST-1—closely orbiting a single star whose surface temperature is less than half that of our Sun. Three of those exoplanets live in the habitable zone.

Various permutations of astrophysicists from Canada, Chile, France, Israel, Italy, Poland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States have been studying the quantum effects of the intense magnetic field surrounding a neutron star; a vast intergalactic void that is helping to propel our galaxy through space by repelling it; an as-yet-unexplained cool region in the cosmic microwave background (imprint from the Big Bang) that may offer the first evidence of the multiverse. They’ve found a large, dim, relatively nearby spheroidal galaxy, similar in total mass to the Milky Way, that was only recently discovered because 99.99 percent of it consists of dark matter. They’ve witnessed an interstellar asteroid, the solar system’s first visitor from elsewhere in the Milky Way, which plunged past the Sun and onward toward Mars at 300,000 kilometers per hour in the fall of 2017.

Besides making discoveries, astrophysicists have speculated that aliens might use lasers to broadcast obviously purposeful signals of their existence that would be picked up by skywatchers carefully monitoring known and suspected exoplanets. Some of us also speculate that aliens may power their interstellar probes with continuous beams from gigantic star-powered radio transmitters, which might explain the brief, otherwise unexplained flashes of radio waves that have been picked up by Earth’s largest radio telescopes and that appear to come from billions of light-years away.

True, some of our mind-altering discoveries and speculations may pique the interest of warfighters and weapons developers. But others may undermine any notion that such a thing as long-term space superiority would ever be possible.

One mind-altering discovery that predates Hubble and all of its spaceborne cousins by decades was the origin of elements in the universe.

Key atoms of our biochemistry and of all life on Earth are traceable to thermonuclear fusion in the hearts of stars. We exist in the universe, and the universe exists within us. This insight, this almost spiritual gift from twentieth-century research to modern civilization, did not arise from a lone, sleepless researcher’s eureka moment but rather from a seminal collaboration of four scientists during the 1950s.

The origin and abundance of the chemical elements had been a long-standing mystery in modern astrophysics. Research into radioactivity—the natural transmutation of elements—led to strong suspicions that some kind of natural nuclear process lurked behind it all, perhaps the same nuclear process that liberated sufficient energy to keep the stars shining.

In 1920, with the carnage of the Great War freshly ended, the English astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington offered prescient reflections on the source of stellar energy at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science:

A star is drawing on some vast reservoir of energy by means unknown to us. This reservoir can scarcely be other than the subatomic energy which, it is known, exists abundantly in all matter; we sometimes dream that man will one day learn how to release it and use it for his service. The store is well-nigh inexhaustible, if only it could be tapped. . . .

If, indeed, the subatomic energy in the stars is being freely used to maintain their great furnaces, it seems to bring a little nearer to fulfillment our dream of controlling this latent power for the well-being of the human race—or for its suicide.²⁷

Major advances in quantum physics unfolded in the 1920s and continued through to 1932 with British physicist James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron, a new subatomic particle. Until then, everything known about stellar structure had told us that, in spite of the extreme temperature and pressure in a star’s core, elements could not be forged there. But that didn’t stop Eddington from engaging in rational speculation or from commenting in his 1926 book The Internal Constitution of the Stars, “We do not argue with the critic who urges that the stars are not hot enough for this process; we tell him to go and find a hotter place.”²⁸ Might he have been telling his detractors to go to hell?

In any case, quantum physics as it stood in the 1930s accounted for the basics of how the Sun converts hydrogen into helium, generating energy as a by-product. But the origin of all the heavier elements remained elusive. Nuclear weapons—developed by the Manhattan Project, in which Chadwick participated—would yield answers.

The only way to know how atomic nuclei combine to make heavy nuclei under high temperatures and pressures, such as the state of affairs you’d find within the core of a star, is to study all the ways, all the places, and all the chances that one specified nucleus can slam into another specified nucleus. These so-called collision cross-sections can be theoretically estimated but, ideally, are measured directly in laboratory experiments.

Fresh access to declassified nuclear physics data from World War II and from the flurry of nuclear bomb tests that followed (underground, on the ground, in the water, and in the air) became just the kind of laboratory needed. By the mid-1950s, enough data was available on what subatomic particles and atomic nuclei do when they collide for Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler, and Fred Hoyle to figure out how and why the life and explosive death of a star makes heavy elements.

In a preview of that work, published early in 1957, Fowler reflects on the value of access to declassified data:

[W]e think that [the element] californium-254 is produced in supernova explosions and that its especially energetic decay with a conveniently observable lifetime makes its presence stand out, but presumably other heavy elements are produced in a similar manner. . . . This highly unclassified result came to light within less than 4 weeks after the publication of the Bikini test results after a lapse of almost 4 years.²⁹

Twenty-three nuclear bombs were detonated by the United States at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific between 1946 and 1958.³⁰ Displaced people. Radioactive terrain. Incinerated flora and fauna. A steep price to pay for data.

The Burbidge team’s research was published in October 1957—the same month the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, starting gun of the space race. While their paper was neutrally titled “Synthesis of the Elements in Stars” and its tone was unvaryingly objective, their work was supported in part by a joint program of the Office of Naval Research and the US Atomic Energy Commission.³¹ As Fowler had written earlier, the californium 254 produced at Bikini contributed significantly to the team’s conclusions. And if, ignoring the arcane science, you read the last few pages of Burbidge et al.’s paper, you cannot help but pick up an implicit expectation or hope that Bikini-like tests will continue, in part because of the notable benefits to astrophysics:

The identification of Cf²⁵⁴ in the Bikini test and then in the supernova in IC 4182 first suggested that here was the seat of the r-process production. Whether this finally turns out to be correct will depend both on further work on the Cf²⁵⁴ fission half-life and on further studies of supernova light curves.³²

No endeavor is ceaselessly noble or electrifying. Eventually the question of money intrudes. Space probes, space telescopes, and frontier research hardware do not come cheap. Yet it’s clear that the bill for worldwide astrophysics research is many orders of magnitude less than the bill for worldwide war³³—that other collaboration of nations besides the Olympics and the World Cup. Even when the world isn’t actually waging all-out war, we spend trillions preparing for it.

Today, astrophysics around the globe is funded at less than $3 billion a year,³⁴ while global military spending is nearing $1.7 trillion. With a 2016 world GDP of almost $76 trillion, that amounts to .004 percent for astrophysics and 2.2 percent for the military.³⁵ One year’s worth of that level of military spending could lavishly fund every astrophysicist in the world for half a millennium.

Now for America. Consider the US contribution to World War II. In just a single year, 1943, military spending on the war swallowed 42 percent of America’s national income.³⁶ Direct, upfront spending on American military operations was $75 billion a year. If the United States funded a war today at the same rate, relative to GDP, that $75 billion would turn into almost $7 trillion a year, or $19 billion a day.³⁷ Two hours’ worth of that level of war spending could fund American astrophysics for an entire year.

You’ve heard the journalists’ maxim “follow the money”? What a country funds is what that country prioritizes. By definition. Decades ago, la dictadura fascista Benito Mussolini, speaking about the Italian economy, declared that “the state will only take up the sectors related to defense, the existence and security of the homeland.”³⁸ Well, the American economy has been sliding in that direction. It’s what General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower lambasted, and it’s a dubious route to genuine security. In 2015 the US government allocated $600 billion—54 percent of its discretionary dollars—to military spending, versus $30 billion, or 3 percent, to science and engineering. In 2016 the United States accounted for a greater share of global military spending—$611 billion of the world’s $1.7 trillion—than the next eight countries combined (China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, UK, Japan, and Germany, in descending order).³⁹

Given all those billions flowing through the system, is it possible there’s no money available to modernize New York City’s century-old subways, to keep New Orleans from drowning again, to build truly affordable housing for the people who collectively make our cities run, to help the Metropolitan Museum of Art reinstate its voluntary admission fee for all visitors, and to expand the search for other habitable planets?

The almost-final word goes to the anonymous carrier of a placard at one of the six-hundred-plus Marches for Science that took place around the world on April 22, 2017. “THINK WHILE IT’S STILL LEGAL,” urged the placard. And while you’re thinking, try to imagine that each of us is a transient assemblage of atoms and molecules; that our planet is one small pebble ambling in orbit through the vacuum of space; that astrophysics, a historical handmaiden of human conflict, now offers a way to redirect our species’ urges to kill into collaborative urges to explore, to uncover alien civilizations, to link Earth with the rest of the cosmos—genetically, chemically, atomically—and protect our home planet until the Sun’s furnace burns itself out five billion years hence.

Try to imagine such things not because they are imaginary, but because they are true.