Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
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Typically, the way our government has birthed new industries is to make the initial investments before capital markets can value them. That’s where the high risk lies. Innovative ideas become inventions. Inventions become patents. Patents earn money. Only when risks are managed and understood do capital markets take notice. Right now, plenty of business goes on in low Earth orbit—all the consumer products that thrive on GPS, direct TV, other satellite communications. These are all commercial markets. So the thinking is to get NASA back on the frontier, where it belongs.
Massimo Pigliucci: Speaking of low Earth orbit, what exactly has the space station been doing up there?
NDT: Even more than research in Antarctica, the International Space Station is the prime example of international cooperation—the largest in human history, aside from the waging of world wars.
Multiple countries have gone down to Antarctica to do collaborative science research. And no one is making land grabs, maybe because no one wants to live there. So that helps in the collaboration: no one wants to be the King of Nothing. Antarctica is not only a beautiful place but also a unique location for conducting certain kinds of science—in part because it’s cold, so there’s low moisture in the air. And the South Pole happens to be at high elevation, so you’re above layers of atmosphere that would otherwise interfere with your view of the night sky. As a result, astrophysics thrives at the South Pole.
The point is, just as Antarctica is an area of considerable international collaboration, so too is the International Space Station. It also demonstrates that we can build big things in space. We once thought that a telescope or some other piece of hardware required a surface on which to build it. But where there’s a surface, there’s gravity—which means the weight of the system requires structural support. But in orbit everything is weightless, permitting the building of huge structures that would be inherently unstable on Earth’s surface.
MP: But would you therefore make an exception for the International Space Station, in terms of this issue of privatization as opposed to government funding of research?
NDT: You wouldn’t necessarily privatize the space station itself right now, but you’d certainly privatize access to it. You’d sell the trips there. Why not? That’s really where privatization would first reveal itself, according to the new plan. And no one’s complaining about that. Where Obama got in a little bit of hot water was his cancellation of the NASA plan to return to the Moon.
The Moon is an interesting target. First, it’s nearby. And having already been there means we can go there now with greater confidence of success, whereas a round trip to Mars involves dangers both known and unknown. Sending astronauts outside the protective blanket of Earth’s magnetic field would leave them vulnerable to ionizing radiation from solar flares, which generate high-energy charged particles that can enter the body and ionize its atoms.
MP: So would you see a possible Moon station as a stepping-stone toward a Mars mission?
NDT: No, because if you’re going to Mars, generally you don’t want to go somewhere else first, because it takes energy to slow down, land, and take off again. Slowing down requires fuel. If the Moon had an atmosphere, you could use it to slow down, just as the space shuttle does as it returns to Earth. That’s why it needs those famous tiles that dissipate the heat of reentry. If we didn’t have a way to dump the energy of motion, the shuttle would be unable to stop.
Space Tweet #12
Just an FYI: If you blow-torch a shuttle tile to red-hot, in time it takes to put down the torch, tile is back to room temp
Mar 9, 2011 11:34 AM
Plus, do you bring all your resources with you? If you’re taking a road trip to California, do you attach a supertanker to your car? Do you bring along a farm? No, you rely on the fact that there’s a string of Quik Marts between here and California, so that you can refuel and buy food.
A long-term goal for living and working in space would be to exploit the resources that are already there. Obama’s National Space Policy does say we should continue to do research on launch vehicles and rocket technologies that will one day get us to Mars, but when that day should come was not specified. And that’s what makes space enthusiasts uncomfortable.
If we were choosing whether to go to the Moon or to Mars, most
scientists—there are some key vocal exceptions, but I’m talking about most scientists, myself included—would pick Mars. It has plenty of evidence for a history of running water and enticing evidence for liquid water laying recent tracks within the soils. It also has methane, effusing its way out of a cliff face. What drives scientists to choose Mars is not just its fascinating geology (though perhaps we should call it marsology, since “geo-” means Earth). Deep down in our quest to know these planetary surfaces is our ongoing search for life, because every place on Earth where there’s liquid water, there’s life.
JG: Can you talk about the advantage of putting a human on Mars, as opposed to robotic exploration of Mars?
NDT: There’s no advantage. That’s the short answer. But let me provide some nuance. It costs anywhere from twenty to fifty times more money to send a human to a space destination than it does to send a robot. Say you’re a geologist, and I tell you, “I could send you to Mars with your rock hammer and maybe a few machines to make measurements. I can do that once, or I can fund thirty different rovers that can be placed anywhere you choose on the Martian surface, and they’ll carry the machines that I’d otherwise be giving to you.” Which would you pick?
MP: It seems like a no-brainer to me.
NDT: Scientifically, it’s a no-brainer. That’s the point. It’s because of the price difference that any scientist interested in scientific results would not, could not, with a clear conscience, send a human there. That leaves two options. Either you seriously lower the cost of sending humans there, so that it’s competitive with sending robots, or you send a person regardless of the cost, because a person can do in a few minutes what it might take a rover all day to do. And that’s because the human brain is more intuitive about what it’s looking at than is the robot you’ve programmed. A program represents a subset of what you are, but it’s still not you. And if you’re the programmer, can you make a computer more intuitive than you are? I’ll leave that one for you philosophers.
MP: Before the show we were talking about something very pertinent to this topic: how extremely large and expensive projects got funded historically.
NDT: There are really just three justifications for spending large portions of state wealth—three drivers. One of them is praise of royalty and deity: activities undertaken in part out of deep respect and in part out of deep fear of the power for which you’re building the monument.
MP: We could ask the Pope to fund the mission to Mars.
NDT: In principle, yes. However, we live in a time when nation-states don’t commonly undertake such activities. That leaves the other two drivers I found. One is the promise of economic return; the other, of course, is war. I think of the pair as the I-don’t-want-to-die driver and the I-don’t-want-to-die-poor driver.
We all remember President Kennedy saying, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” These are powerful words; they galvanized the ambitions of a nation. But this was a speech given to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, just a few weeks after the Soviet Union successfully launched Yuri Gagarin into Earth orbit—the first person to get there. Kennedy’s speech was a reaction to the fact that the United States did not yet have a “man-rated” rocket, meaning a rocket safe enough for human spaceflight. To put a satellite in space, you might be willing to experiment with cheaper components or design than you’d use for putting a person up there.
A few paragraphs earlier in that same speech, Kennedy says, “If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space w
hich occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.” This was a battle cry against communism.
MP: It was a political statement.
NDT: Period. He could have said, “Let’s go to the Moon: what a marvelous place to explore!” But that’s not enough to get Congress to write the check. At some point, somebody’s got to write a check.
JG: Right. The Soviet Union was the catalyst then, and China is the catalyst now. China’s space program is developing, right? And in the next ten or fifteen years, China may be poised to rival us as the superpower of the world. So that could potentially spark another influx and interest in funding space exploration.
NDT: A “Sputnik moment.”
JG: That’s a good name for it. But the kind of research that might be justified by that kind of reason might not be the best kind of scientific research.
NDT: Science alone has never been a driver of expensive projects. Below a certain level, depending on the wealth of a nation, money can be spent on science without heavy debate. For example, the price tag for the Hubble Space Telescope, over all its years, is about $10 to $12 billion—less than $1 billion per year. That’s comfortably below the radar of criticism for a science project or for a project not based on the economy or war. Raise the cost of a project above $20 billion to $30 billion, and if there’s not a weapon at the other end of the experiment, or you won’t see the face of God, or oil wells aren’t to be found, it risks not getting funded. That’s what happened with the Superconducting Super Collider. America was going to have the most powerful particle accelerator in the world; it was conceived in the late 1970s and funded in the mid-1980s. Then 1989 comes around. What happens? Peace breaks out.
MP: I hate when that happens!
JG: It’s so inconvenient!
NDT: When you’re at war, money flows like rivers. In 1945 physicists basically won the war in the Pacific with the Manhattan Project. Long before the bomb, and continuing through the entire Cold War, America sustained a fully funded particle physics program. Then the Berlin wall comes down in 1989, and within four years the entire budget for the Super Collider gets canceled.
What happens now? Europe says, “We’ll take the mantle.” They start building the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and now we’re standing on our shores and looking across the pond, crying out, “Can we join? Can we help?”
MP: I remember an interesting exchange from those hearings you’re talking about. One senator who was evaluating the continued expense for the Super Collider said to Steven Weinberg, a physicist testifying before Congress, “Unfortunately, one of the problems is that it’s hard for me to justify this expense to my constituents, because, after all, nobody eats quarks.” And then Weinberg, in his typical fashion, pretended to do a little calculation on the piece of paper in front of him and, as I remember it, said something along the lines of, “Actually, Senator, by my calculation, you just ate a billion billion billion quarks this morning for breakfast.” In any case, the bottom line is that large basic-research projects get funded only if they piggyback on, as you said, the big three.
NDT: Either they have to piggyback on one of them or come in below the funding threshold for getting scrutinized.
MP: Somebody may reasonably ask, “Should it be otherwise?” In some sense, the senator brought up a good question: How do I justify this to my constituents?
NDT: I claim that even if Weinberg had said, “At the end of this, you’ll get great technological spin-offs,” it would still have been canceled. He would have had to say, “At the end of this, you’ll have a weapon that protects the country.” There’s a famous reply, I don’t remember who said it to whom, but it would have played well here. The senator says to the scientist, “What aspects of this project will help in the defense of America?”—there it is, plainly stated: the question of war—and the scientist replies, “Senator, I don’t know how it can help in the defense of America, other than to ensure that America is a country worth defending.”
MP: And that, as you know, is a great argument that doesn’t fly.
NDT: Yes, it makes a good headline, but no, it doesn’t garner the funding. Unless we’re going to believe we’re a fundamentally different kind of population and culture than those that have preceded us for the past five thousand years, I’m going to take my cue from the history of major funded projects and say that if we want to go to Mars, we’d better find either an economic driver or a military driver for it. Sometimes I half-joke about this and say, “Let’s get China to leak a memo that says they want to build military bases on Mars. We’d be on Mars in twelve months.”
JG: Do you think there’s any case to be made for the fact that so many scientific discoveries that end up being incredibly useful and practical were discovered accidentally, in the course of exploratory research or completely unrelated research—that the discoverers got lucky? Can we make that case for space exploration?
NDT: That’s an excellent question. But no, because the time delay between a serendipitous scientific discovery on the frontier and the fully developed product that has been engineered, designed, and marketed is typically longer than the reelection cycles of those who allocate money. Therefore it does not survive. You can’t get politicians to decide to invest this way, because it’s irrelevant to the needs of their constituencies. So I don’t think we’ll ever go to Mars unless we can find an economic or a military reason for doing so.
By the way, I know how to justify the $100 billion. But my pitch takes longer than what’s called the “elevator conversation” with the member of Congress, where you get only thirty seconds to make your case, and it’s your only chance—go! I need maybe three minutes.
JG: You could stop the elevator.
MP: Or, if you wanted to make the point to the general public rather than the congressman, you could say, “Here are good reasons to fund space exploration or basic scientific research in astrophysics. It’s not just my curiosity or my wanting to be paid to do things I like.”
NDT: In fact, we are funding basic research in astrophysics. But my conversation with you is about the manned space program. That’s where the expense comes in. That’s where all your budget options come in above the funding threshold for heavy scrutiny, and you have no choice but to appeal to these great drivers in the history of culture. As far as basic research goes, we’ve got the Hubble telescope; we’re going to have a laboratory on Mars in a few years; we have the spacecraft Cassini in orbit around Saturn right now, observing the planet and its moons and its ring systems. We’ve got another spacecraft on its way to Pluto. We’ve got telescopes being designed and built that will observe more parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Science is getting done. I wish there was more of it, but it’s getting done.
MP: But not the Large Hadron Collider, which is getting done by the Europeans.
JG: There’s one other potential case for space travel that we haven’t really talked about. Earlier you alluded to the idea that if we become a spacefaring people, we might need to use the Moon and Mars as a sort of Quik Mart. Do you think we could make the practical case that we need to venture out into space because Earth will at some point become uninhabitable?
NDT: There are many who make that case. Stephen Hawking is among them; J. Richard Gott at Princeton is another. But if we acquire enough know-how to terraform Mars and ship a billion people there, surely that know-how will include the capacity to fix Earth’s rivers, oceans, and atmosphere, as well as to deflect asteroids. So I don’t think escaping to other planets is necessarily the most expedient solution to protecting life on Earth.
• • • CHAPTER TWELVE
PATHS TO DISCOVERY*
From the Discovery of Places to the Discovery of Ideas
In how many ways does society today differ from that of last year, last century,
or last millennium? The list of medical and scientific achievements would convince anybody that we live in special times. It’s easy to notice what is different; the challenge is to see what has remained the same.
Behind all the technology, we’re still human beings, no more or less so than participants in all the rest of recorded history. In particular, some of the basic forces in organized society change slowly, if at all; contemporary humans still exhibit basic behaviors. We climb mountains, wage war, vie for sex, seek entertainment, and long for economic and political power. Complaints about the demise of society and the “youth of today” also tend to be timeless. Consider this pronouncement, inscribed on an Assyrian tablet circa 2800 B.C.:
Our earth is degenerate these days . . . bribery and corruption abound, children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching.
The urge to climb a mountain may not be shared by everyone, but the urge to discover—which might drive some people to climb mountains and others to invent methods of cooking—does seem to be shared, and that tendency has been uniquely responsible for changes in society across the centuries. Discovery is the only enterprise that builds upon itself, persists from generation to generation, and expands human understanding of the universe. This is true whether the boundary of your known world is the other side of the ocean or the other side of the galaxy.
Discovery provokes comparisons between what you already know to exist and what you have just discovered. Successful prior discoveries often help dictate how subsequent discoveries unfold. To find something that has no analog to your own experience constitutes a personal discovery. To find something with no analog to the sum of the world’s known objects, life-forms, practices, and physical processes constitutes a discovery for all of humanity.