Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier

by Neil Degrasse Tyson; Avis Lang

  • • • CHAPTER NINE

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY, NASA*

  Dear NASA,

  Happy birthday! Perhaps you didn’t know, but we’re the same age. In the first week of October 1958, you were born of the National Aeronautics and Space Act as a civilian space agency, while I was born of my mother in the East Bronx. So the yearlong celebration of our golden anniversaries, which began the day after we both turned forty-nine, provides me a unique occasion to reflect on our past, present, and future.

  I was three years old when John Glenn first orbited Earth. I was eight when you lost astronauts Chaffee, Grissom, and White in that tragic fire of their Apollo 1 capsule on the launchpad. I was ten when you landed Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon. And I was fourteen when you stopped going to the Moon altogether. Over that time I was excited for you and for America. But the vicarious thrill of the journey, so prevalent in the hearts and minds of others, was absent from my emotions. I was obviously too young to be an astronaut. But I also knew that my skin color was much too dark for you to picture me as part of this epic adventure. Not only that, even though you are a civilian agency, your most celebrated astronauts were military pilots, at a time when war was becoming less and less popular.

  During the 1960s, the civil rights movement was surely more real to me than to you. In fact, it took a directive from Vice President Johnson in 1963 to force you to hire black engineers at your prestigious Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. I found the correspondence in your archives. Do you remember? James Webb, then head of NASA, wrote to German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun, who headed the center and was the chief engineer of the entire manned space program. The letter boldly and bluntly directs von Braun to address the “lack of equal employment opportunity for Negroes” in the region, and to collaborate with the region’s colleges Alabama A&M and Tuskegee to identify, train, and recruit qualified Negro engineers into the NASA Huntsville family.

  In 1964, you and I had not yet turned six when I saw picketers outside the newly built apartment complex of our choice, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. They were protesting to prevent Negro families, mine included, from moving there. I’m glad their efforts failed. These buildings were called, perhaps prophetically, the Skyview Apartments, on whose roof, twenty-two stories above the Bronx, I would later train my telescope on the universe.

  My father was active in the civil rights movement, working under New York City’s Mayor Lindsay to create job opportunities for youth in the ghetto, as the “inner city” was called back then. Year after year, the forces operating against this effort were huge: poor schools, bad teachers, meager resources, abject racism, and assassinated leaders. So while you were celebrating your monthly advances in space exploration from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo, I was watching America do all it could to marginalize who I was and what I wanted to become in life.

  I looked to you for guidance, for a vision statement that I could adopt and that would fuel my ambitions. But you weren’t there for me. Of course, I shouldn’t blame you for society’s woes. Your conduct was a symptom of America’s habits, not a cause. I knew this. But you should nonetheless know that among my colleagues, I am the only one in my generation who became an astrophysicist in spite of your achievements in space rather than because of them. For my inspiration, I instead turned to libraries, remaindered books on the cosmos from bookstores, my rooftop telescope, and the Hayden Planetarium. After some fits and starts through my years in school, when becoming an astrophysicist seemed at times to be the path of most resistance through an unwelcoming society, I became a professional scientist. I became an astrophysicist.

  Over the decades that followed, you’ve come a long way—including, most recently, a presidentially initiated, congressionally endorsed vision statement that finally gets us back out of low Earth orbit. Whoever does not yet recognize the value of this adventure to our nation’s future soon will, as the rest of the developed and developing world passes us by in every measure of technological and economic strength. Not only that, today you look much more like America—from your senior-level managers to your most decorated astronauts. Congratulations. You now belong to the entire citizenry. Examples of this abound, but I especially remember in 2004 when the public rallied around the Hubble Telescope, your most beloved unmanned mission. They all spoke loudly, ultimately reversing the threat that the telescope’s life might not be extended for another decade. Hubble’s transcendent images of the cosmos had spoken to us all, as did the personal profiles of the space shuttle astronauts who deployed and serviced the telescope, and the scientists who benefited from its data stream.

  Not only that, I’ve even joined the ranks of your most trusted, as I served dutifully on your advisory council. I came to recognize that when you’re at your best, nothing in this world can inspire the dreams of a nation the way you can—dreams carried by a parade of ambitious students, eager to become scientists, engineers, and technologists in the service of the greatest quest there ever was. You have come to represent a fundamental part of America’s identity, not only to itself but to the world.

  So, now that we’ve both turned forty-nine and are well into our fiftieth orbit around the Sun, I want you to know that I feel your pains and share your joys. And I look forward to seeing you back on the Moon. But don’t stop there. Mars beckons, as do destinations beyond.

  Birthday buddy, even if I have not always been, I am now your humble servant.

  NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON

  Astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History

  • • • CHAPTER TEN

  THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS IN SPACE*

  It would be hard to discuss the next fifty years in space without some reflection on the previous fifty. I happen to have been born the same week NASA was founded, in early October 1958. That means my earliest awareness of the world took place in the 1960s, during the Apollo era. It was also a turbulent decade internationally, and America was no exception. We were at war in Southeast Asia, the civil rights movement was under way, assassinations were taking place, and NASA was heading for the Moon.

  At the time, it seemed clear that the astronauts, whatever criteria were used to select them, would never have included me. The astronauts were drawn from the military—all but two of them. One was Neil Armstrong, a civilian test pilot and aeronautical engineer—the commander of Apollo 11 and the first human to step foot on the Moon. The other was Harrison Schmitt, a geologist, the only scientist to go to the Moon. Schmitt was the lunar module pilot of Apollo 17, America’s last Moon mission.

  Perhaps the most turbulent year of that turbulent decade was 1968, yet that’s the year Apollo 8 became the first craft ever to leave low Earth orbit and go to the Moon. That journey took place in December, at the end of an intense and bloody year. During Apollo 8’s figure-eight orbit, its astronauts took the most recognized photograph in the history of the world. As the spacecraft emerged from behind the far side of the Moon, they pulled out the camera, looked through the window of the command module, and captured Earth rising over the lunar landscape. This widely published image, titled Earthrise, presented Earth as a cosmic object, aloft in the sky of another cosmic object. It was simultaneously thrilling and humbling, beautiful and also a little scary.

  By the way, the title Earthrise is a bit misleading. Earth has tidally locked the Moon, which means that the Moon eternally shows only one side to us. The urge is strong to presume that Earth rises and sets for observers on the Moon just as the Moon rises and sets for observers on Earth. But as seen from the Moon’s near side, Earth never rises. It’s just always there, floating in the sky.

  Everybody remembers the 1960s as the era of the right stuff, but it had its share of robotic missions as well. The first rovers on the Moon were Russian: Luna 9 and Luna 13. America’s Ranger 7 was the first US spacecraft to photograph the Moon’s surface. But those go unremembered by the public, even though they were our robotic forebearers in space, because there was a much bigger story being told:
only when human emissaries were doing the exploring did people feel a vicarious attachment to the dramas unfolding on the space frontier.

  Because I grew up in America, I took for granted that, by and large, everybody thinks about tomorrow, next year, five years from now, ten years from now. It’s a popular pastime. If you say to someone, “So, what are you up to?” they’re not going to tell you what they’re doing today. No, they’re going to tell you what they’re planning: “I’m saving to go on a trip to the Caribbean,” or “We’re going to buy a bigger house,” or “We’re going to have two more kids.” People are envisioning the future.

  Americans are not alone in this, of course. But in some countries I visit, I speak to people who do not think about the future. And any country where people do not think about the future is a country without a space program. Space, I have learned, is a frontier that keeps you dreaming about what might get discovered tomorrow—a fundamental feature of being human.

  Around the world and across time, every people and every culture—even those with no written language—has some sort of story that accounts, mythologically or otherwise, for its existence and its relationship to the known universe. These are not new questions. These are old questions. This is an old quest.

  Humans are one of very few animals that are perfectly happy sleeping on their backs. Also, we sleep at night. What happens if you wake up from sleeping at night on your back? You see the stars. It is possible that, of all the animals in the history of life on Earth, we may be uniquely curious about the sky, and so perhaps we should not be surprised that we wonder about our place in the cosmos.

  Space Tweet #9

  The night is our day. Marry astronomers—you’ll always know where they are at night

  Jul 14, 2010 6:08 AM

  Today when we think of distant objects in space, we make plans to go there. We’ve gone to the Moon. We talk about the possibility of going to Mars. The twentieth century, of course, was the first in which the methods and tools of science—and particularly the methods and tools of space exploration—enabled us to answer age-old questions without reference to mythological sources: Where did we come from? Where are we going? Where do we fit in the universe? Many of our answers have come not simply because we went to the Moon or to some other celestial object but because space offers us places from which to access the rest of the cosmos.

  Most of what the universe wants to tell us doesn’t reach Earth’s surface. We would know nothing of black holes were it not for telescopes launched into space. We would know nothing of various explosions in the universe that are rich in X-rays, gamma rays, or ultraviolet. Before we had vistas in space—telescopes, satellites, space probes—that enabled us to conduct astrophysical studies without interference from Earth’s atmosphere, which we normally think of as transparent, we were almost blind to the universe.

  When I think of tomorrow’s space exploration, I don’t think of low Earth orbit—altitudes less than about two thousand kilometers. In the 1960s that was a frontier. But now low Earth orbit is routine. It can still be dangerous, but it isn’t a space frontier. Take me somewhere new. Do something more than drive around the block.

  Yes, the Moon is a destination. Mars is a destination. But the Lagrangian points are destinations too. Those are where gravitational and centrifugal forces balance in a rotating system such as Earth and the Moon or Earth and the Sun. At destinations such as those, we can build things. We already have some experience, brought by building the International Space Station, which is bigger than most things ever conceived or constructed on Earth.

  If you ask me, “What is culture?” I would say it is all the things we do as a nation or group or inhabitants of a city or region, yet no longer pay attention to. It’s the things we take for granted. I’m a New Yorker, and so, for example, I no longer notice when I walk past a seventy-story building. Yet every tourist who comes to New York City from any place in the world is continually looking up. So I ask myself, What do people elsewhere take for granted in their own cultures?

  Sometimes it’s the simple things. Last time I visited Italy, I went to a supermarket and saw an entire aisle of pasta. I had never seen that before. There were pasta shapes that never make it to the United States. So I asked my Italian friends, “Do you notice this?” And they said no, it was simply the pasta aisle. In the Far East, there are entire aisles of rice, with choices undreamt of in America. So I asked a friend who wasn’t born in America, “What’s in our supermarkets that you think I no longer notice?” And she said, “You have an entire aisle of ready-to-eat breakfast cereals.” To me, of course, that’s just the cereal aisle. We have entire aisles full of soft drinks: Coke and Pepsi and all their derivatives. Yet that’s just the soda aisle to me.

  Where am I going with these examples? In America, everyday items incorporate icons from the space program. You can buy refrigerator magnets in the shape of the Hubble Space Telescope. You can buy boxes of bandages decorated not only with Spider-Man and Superman and Barbie but also with stars and moons and planets that glow in the dark. You can buy pineapple slices cut into Cosmic Fun Shapes. And for car names, the cosmos ranks second after geographic locations. This is the space component of culture that people no longer notice.

  Space Tweet #10

  Tasty Cosmos: Mars bar, Milky Way bar. MoonPie, Eclipse gum, Orbit gum, Sunkist, Celestial Seasonings. No food named Uranus

  Jul 10, 2010 11:28 AM

  Several years ago I served on a commission whose task was to analyze the future of the US aerospace industry—which had been falling on hard times, in part because of the success of Airbus in Europe and Embraer in Brazil. We went around the world to explore the economic climate in which American industries are functioning, so that we could advise Congress and the aerospace industry how to restore the leadership, or at least the competitiveness, that they (and we all) may once have taken for granted.

  So we visited various countries in Western Europe and worked our way east. Our last stop was Moscow. One of the places we visited was Star City, a training center for cosmonauts where you’ll find a striking monument in honor of Yuri Gagarin. Following the usual introductory platitudes and a morning shot of vodka, the director of Star City just sat back, loosened his tie, and spoke longingly of space. His eyes sparkled, as did mine, and I felt a connection I did not feel in England or France or Belgium or Italy or Spain.

  That connection exists, of course, because our two nations, for a brief moment in history, directed major resources toward putting people into space. Having engaged in that endeavor has worked its way into both Russian and American culture, so that we don’t conceive of life without it. My camaraderie with Star City’s director made me think about what the world would be like if every country were engaged in that enterprise. I imagined our being connected with one another on a higher plane—beyond economic and military conflicts, beyond war altogether. I wondered how two nations with such deep, shared dreams about human presence in space could have remained such long-standing adversaries in the post–World War II era.

  I have another example of space becoming part of culture. Three years ago, when NASA announced that an upcoming servicing mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope might be canceled, it became big news in America. Do you know who played the biggest role in reversing that decision? Not the astrophysicists. It was the general public. Why? They had beautified their walls, computer screens, CD covers, guitars, and high-fashion gowns with Hubble images, and so in their own way they had become vicarious participants in cosmic discovery. The public took ownership of the Hubble Space Telescope, and eventually, after a slew of editorials, letters to the editor, talk-show discussions, and congressional debates, the funding was restored. I do not know of another time in the history of science when the public took ownership of a scientific instrument. But it happened then and there, marking the ascent of the Hubble into popular American culture.

  I won’t soon forget the deep feeling of commonality I had while sitting aroun
d schmoozing at Star City with members of the Russian space community. If the whole world shared such experiences, we would then have common dreams and everybody could begin thinking about tomorrow. And if everybody thinks about tomorrow, then someday we can all visit the sky together.

  Space Tweet #11

  Would a NASA reality show “Lunar Shore” be more popular than “Jersey Shore”? Civilization’s future depends on that answer

  May 16, 2011 8:18 AM

  • • • CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SPACE OPTIONS

  Podcast interview with Julia Galef and Massimo Pigliucci for Rationally Speaking*

  Julia Galef: Our guest in the studio today is Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium. Neil is joining us to talk about the status of the space program today—what are its current goals, and what practical benefit does the space program have for our society? And to the extent that it doesn’t have practical benefits, what are the justifications for spending taxpayer money on it—or on any other science without applied benefit?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson: Let me remind some listeners, or alert them perhaps for the first time, what it is we’re talking about. The Obama administration, in the new NASA budget, made some fundamental changes to the portfolio of NASA’s ambitions. Some are good; some are neutral; some have been heavily criticized. The one that has had hardly any resistance, and was broadly praised, was the urge to get NASA out of low Earth orbit and to cede that activity to private enterprise.