Accessory to War

by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

  The Cox Committee’s final report opened with accusations against the People’s Republic of China: that it had “stolen design information on the United States’ most advanced thermonuclear weapons” and had “penetrat[ed] our national weapons laboratories.” The highest-profile individual victim was Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwan-born US citizen who in 1999 was labeled a spy, fired without review, and held for 278 days without bail in solitary confinement for downloading restricted data, until a federal judge ordered his release, expressing his “great sadness” at having been “led astray last December by the executive branch of our government . . . who have embarrassed our entire nation . . . by the way this case began and was handled.” The government ended up dropping fifty-eight of its fifty-nine charges.90

  All told, these measures to restrict space exports and freeze out a potential competitor may have created more problems than they solved. US aerospace jobs and global market share took a major, lasting dive. China began to pursue an independently cooperative path in space, including its own space station, which would welcome attachable foreign modules for long-term stays and foreign crew-transport vehicles for short stays. One bizarre piece of the picture is that a few months after the Cox Report came out, Congress voted to make China one of America’s “most favored nation” partners in trade—except for aerospace.

  Meanwhile, France and Britain began to work with China to develop “ITAR-free” spacecraft, circumventing US restrictions. Russian–Chinese cooperation continued. China’s Long March rockets became an attractive, moderate-cost launch option available to other countries. By 2007 China had displaced Europe from third place as a satellite-launching power, behind Russia and the United States. By 2011 it had displaced the United States. James Clay Moltz concludes that China had gone a long way toward “successfully outflank[ing] the U.S. sanctions, although it also attracted unwanted attention to the continued, central role of the military in its space program.”91

  Despite America’s obvious inability to keep pace with the fast-growing international space community, Congress was obstinate. In late 2011 both houses agreed to include a provision in the annual appropriations act that explicitly prohibited NASA from engaging in any contract or collaboration with China that would enable Chinese access to advanced Western technologies associated with “national security or economic security.” Nor could Chinese officials even set foot in a NASA facility.92

  So counterproductive, constraining, and ungenerous were these policies of exclusion that US officials, including not only heads of NASA but even presidents, periodically ignored them or at least pushed the envelope. In 2005 the United States gave China tracking data on space debris to help ensure a safe trajectory for a Shenzhou manned mission. In 2006 President George W. Bush proposed to President Hu Jintao that America and China would benefit from significant space cooperation in the unspecified future. That same year, NASA administrator Michael Griffin met the assistant administrator of the CNSA on American soil and later, despite opposition from some members of Congress, traveled to China—though once there, he was forbidden access to the military-controlled space facilities. Following their summit in 2009, President Obama and President Hu called for “expanding discussions on space science cooperation and starting a dialogue on human space flight and space exploration.” In 2010 Charles Bolden, the next NASA administrator, had a better visit to China than his predecessor’s. In 2014 satellites were removed from the ITAR list. By 2015 discussions about inviting a Chinese taikonaut—yuhangyuan, “traveler of the universe”—aboard the International Space Station were under way. John Logsdon, founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, points out that the 2011 prohibitions are merely bilateral and that welcoming China into the multilateral ISS would be a politically smart “escape route from current limitations.” Johnson-Freese and Sheehan point out that the docking mechanism for China’s manned Shenzhou spacecraft is a Russian design, already in use on the International Space Station to accommodate both Russian and US vehicles. Nevertheless, no taikonaut has yet served as an ISS crew member. But as Johnson-Freese suggests, China’s own evolving Tiangong space station, which will enjoy the cooperation of the European Space Agency, stands a chance of becoming “the de facto international space station” when America and Russia say goodbye to the ISS.93

  On January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump was sworn into office as president of the United States. One week later he issued an executive order permanently barring refugees from Syria and temporarily refusing entry to immigrants from seven Muslim-majority nations, whether the immigrants were first-time applicants or returnees from travel abroad. Thousands of people and scores of lawyers massed at airports in protest, and the order ended up in court.

  Experts in many fields used their power and prestige to decry the ban on immigration and travel. Scientists were no exception—after all, the laws of the universe transcend nationality, ethnicity, and genetic heritage. The International Astronomical Union’s secretary general urged that “any new or existing limitations to the free circulation of world citizens . . . take into account the necessary mobility of astronomers as well as human rights at large.” The Royal Astronomical Society characterized the ban as “hinder[ing] researchers from sharing their work with their peers, a fundamental tenet of scientific endeavour.” Almost two hundred American scientific organizations and universities added their names to a letter to the president warning that the ban would “discourage many of the best and brightest international students, scholars, engineers and scientists from studying and working, attending academic and scientific conferences, or seeking to build new businesses in the United States.” Even before the new president took office, physicist Richard L. Garwin organized an open letter to Trump that was signed by several dozen specialists in “the physics and technology of nuclear power and of nuclear weapons,” including a number of Nobel laureates. The signatories contended that the multilateral Iran Deal—often derided by the president during the election campaign as “the worst deal ever negotiated”—was in fact “a strong bulwark against an Iranian nuclear weapons program.” To date, this deal is still in place.

  In late January, just days after huge women’s marches took place across the world, concerned scientists made a decision to hold a March for Science in Washington, DC, on April 22, 2017. More than three hundred scientific organizations, including the American Astronomical Society and the Planetary Society, signed on as partners. On the designated day, the global roster of “satellite” marches numbered 610. Why march? “People who value science have remained silent for far too long in the face of policies that ignore scientific evidence and endanger both human life and the future of our world,” answered the organizers. “We face a possible future where people not only ignore scientific evidence, but seek to eliminate it entirely. Staying silent is a luxury that we can no longer afford.”94

  What can we afford?

  As of late March the new administration’s budget ideas for the remainder of FY2017 included a $52.3 billion (10 percent) increase for the Department of Defense, coupled with large percentage cuts in most other departments, agencies, and programs, from the State Department (29 percent) to the Environmental Protection Agency (31 percent) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (50 percent), along with the elimination of funding for indulgences such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. NASA was to squeak by with a one percent cut. But in early May 2017, Congress had other ideas: a 3 percent increase for NASA Science inside a 2 percent increase for NASA overall. ARPA–E got a 5 percent increase, while the NEA, NEH, and CPB were held flat. For FY2018, funding for the Department of Defense’s S & T programs jumped 6 percent, with applied research and advanced technology development leading the way. Turning designs into operational capabilities was the goal, with directed-energy weapons a popular line item.95

  Reaction against America’s forty-fifth pr
esident, his administration, his supporters, and his party has come from many quarters. But with any increase in popular resistance comes an increased possibility of retaliation by those with more obvious, more weaponized power.

  In a confrontation between the many and the few, military power is never irrelevant. Deployed on orders from any government, military power is not autonomous. It is a tool of policy. And as the military has told us in hundreds of ways in thousands of documents, space power—especially the many kinds of satellites in Earth orbit—is now an indispensable piece of the warfighter’s arsenal. As with other forms of power, near-Earth space power can be used for both protection and persecution, against an individual or a group, a building or a bridge, a domestic threat or a foreign militia. It can be used against the citizenry at large. The many varieties of surveillance can be both legitimate and illegitimate, snaring known enemies and unforeseen attacks as readily as random passersby and random trysts. Satellite surveillance of North Korean missile-launch sites provides a crucial source of forewarning for North Korea’s neighbors, whereas the satellite tracking of cars in Xinjiang Province, where the Chinese government has mandated that a positioning system be installed in all vehicles as part of its anti-terror campaign, smells more like government overreach and invasion of privacy.

  Space power as embraced and exercised by the military seems worlds away from the power of space as understood by the astrophysicist. Yet as we’ve seen, they intersect surprisingly often, to mutual advantage. Across history, the roster of nations that wielded the most power on the world stage—military as well as economic—strongly coincides with the roster of nations whose scientists were the most knowledgeable about the doings of the universe.

  What propelled America to the Moon was not science or exploration, but fear and competition with the Soviet Union. A contest of worldviews. A battle of political and economic philosophies. Might the subsequent rocket-rise of China, in every way that matters on the world stage—economic, political, technological, military—propel America back into space? Is a formidable spacefaring adversary a more powerful inducement than a peaceable ally? In the 1960s, faced with a Cold War space adversary, the United States placed the bootprints of twelve astronauts on the dusty lunar surface. Since then, faced with peacetime ISS collaborators, our astronauts have stayed in low Earth orbit, boldly going where hundreds have gone before.

  Cosmic discovery is often enabled even when it’s not the driver—and even when the show of force is not weapons but technological bravado. All Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts except one served in the US military. Yet it was NASA, a civilian agency, that sent them into space. Soft power at its finest. Science budgets didn’t pay for the Moon landings, but science certainly benefited. The astrophysical history of the Earth–Moon system and the geology of the lunar surface came into sharp focus only after the rocks collected by Apollo astronauts were returned to Earth for analysis. Interplanetary space is the next arena where the soft power of technological bravado, augmented by the lure of unlimited resources, urges us to take flight.

  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 w
orld’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.