Moon Rockets and the Decay of the Nation

Forty-five years ago this week, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. In the decade that followed his historic mission, the United States spent $6.5 billion dollars and an enormous amount of energy and manpower to develop the Saturn V and Apollo missions to reach the moon.

In an op-ed in Tuesday’s New York Times, Carolyn Porco, a NASA planetary scientist and one of the a leaders of the unmanned Cassini mission, argued that the Nixon administration’s decision to cancel—“largely for political reasons”—the Saturn V program, “was a gargantuan mistake” from the point of view of the space-exploration community.

Porco doesn’t go into what those political reasons were; instead she makes the case that in terms of lost investment and time, it would have made far more sense to continue the large-payload Saturn V program than switch to the space shuttle and “retreat to low Earth orbit, where we’ve spent the last 25 years going around in circles.” She concludes the op-ed by celebrating the fact that after this long hiatus, NASA now has plans to return to the moon and build a permanent space-station there.

Missing from her argument is any serious reflection on what the real “political” reason for the Saturn V’s cancellation was: it’s overwhelming cost. At the time the program was cancelled, the United States was in the midst of a decade of inflation and mailase, and was trying to extricate itself from an unwinnable foreign war. A few years earlier, the country had taken on large new entitlement programs even as it saw its domestic oil production peak and begin to decline; in 1974 (the same year the Saturn V program was cancelled) we saw the decade’s first world oil shock. In 1971, President Nixon effectively ended the Bretton Woods international finance system, ending convertibility of the dollar to gold and, in the view of many economists, setting in motion the increasingly dangerous cycles of debt and inflation that persist to this day. Clearly, there were many reasons to wonder if continuing the Saturn V program was the best way for the nation to spend its money.

Is there any indication that the nation can afford the extravagance of manned space-flight any more now than it did then—at a time of deep energy insecurity and un-winnable foreign wars, when we have a trade deficit that would have caused a currency crisis in any other nation? If there is, Porco doesn’t offer it.

The point is not simply that investing billions in manned space-flight is not a good idea, but that our entire collective apparatus for assessing and allocating our wealth and resources is broken. From the war in Iraq, to the $2.5 billion freedom tower, to the more mundane pattern of mindless sprawl and highway building, America seems determined to behave as if we lived in a world of no economic, environmental or energy constraints, spending our social and intellectual capital on frivolous expenditures even as the country rots away from underneath us.

In the words of a 2005 report from the American Society of Civil Engineers, “America’s Crumbing Infrastructure [is] Eroding [the] Quality of Life” in our country. The report assigns the country a D as a cumulative grade for the state of its roads, bridges, dams, drinking water, energy, rail, public parks, schools and other categories. But there is no public movement to repair our infrastructure or rebuild our railroad system, or for that matter engage in a real, sustained build-up of alternative energy. A recent study indicated that the offshore wind potential of the Mid-Atlantic alone could supply the entire energy needs of nine states, from Massachussets to North Carolina. Given the severe insecurity of our oil and natural gas supplies, nothing would make more sense than engage in a rapid build-up of this resource. Instead we seem bent on “burn[ing] up the Midwest's last six inches of topsoil in our gas-tanks.”

For someone conditioned to a certain mindset, these are hard facts to accept. I myself grew up loving skyscrapers and the dream of universal space-travel; of being a part of the tallest, fastest, biggest endeavors of mankind. But if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that symbolic gestures of gigantism cannot substitute for the basic functions of society.

Sadly the nation seem less able than ever to distinguish between the symbolic and the real. Like the main character in the forthcoming movie, The Astronaut Farmer, who sets out to prove that even a lone farmer can whip up a space rocket, as long as he believes in himself (“Somewhere along the line, we stopped believing that we can do anything,” he says), we persist with an unshakable collective belief that with sufficient faith and a high enough credit score, anything we wish for can be ours.

It scacely makes a difference anymore whether our achievements are real or fictional; after all, for the average person, The Astronaut Farmer is as likely to have as great an impact on his life as another real trip to the moon. It hardly seems like an accident that the peak of the space age was shortly superseded by a new age of special effects, inaugurated by Star Wars and actualized in countless movies driven less by scripts and stories than by CGI effects. Over the last several decades, exponential growth in real speed and power has been replaced by an explosion of the virtual, and we have accepted the switch without protest.

The Bush administration has raised the substitution of reality with “reality” to an art form. As a senior administration aide explained to New York Times reporter Ron Suskind in 2004, Suskind was “in what we call the reality-based community,” which the aide defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” But according to the aide, “That's not the way the world really works anymore . . . we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The result: a stage-managed “reality” television war, the apparent view that the drowning of New Orleans was first and foremost a public relations problem, and an energy policy which promotes ethanol even while cutting funding for rail. If there is an increasing unease in this country, it is because reality has a nasty habit of breaking through our imaginary world, no matter how much we “believe”.

Comments

[stephen v2]

Found your blog via Google alert. I'm trying to make a film about the "why" of space exploration. I don't think national pride, science, commerce, tourism or international co-operation are great reasons to explore space given the state of the world and the maturity of our civilization.

I also had read Porco's op-ed as well as many others views on human space exploration. Since Carl Sagan's untimely passing, there has been a real struggle to articulate a connection between human life on earth and our connections to the cosmos. While I understand your points (as I do Porco's), I think both are incomplete and fail to offer a real solutions to our future as a species.

However, questions about our future really are questions about who we are, where we came from, why are we here and where are we going? The biggest question is where are we going to find answers to those critical questions - anwers that work for if not all of us, most of us?

I don't pretend to know the answers, but I do believe the answers lie in new places, not in the same old ground that has been gone over and over for generations.

[Lakis]

Thanks for your comment. I'm sorry it's taken me a couple of days to respond.

By "new places" I'm assuming you mean new physical places -- that the answers to our questions is not going to be found in "the same old ground."

I must say I have always been drawn to the romance of exploration as a way of answering our deepest existential questions -- and there certainly is ample historical precedent for this. But it also has a dark side -- see the opening of Lewis Mumford's "Pentagon of Power". (Mumford also addresses space exploration later in the book).

In reality, I don't think we'll be building a space station on the moon (or if we do, it's utility will be short lived) because I think that energy constraints will soon force us to downscale everything and live within our "annual solar budget".

My point is that the fact we are talking about moon bases at a time when the world is about to enter a permanent energy shortage indicates that something about our system of allocating resources is amiss.

Or to put it another way, I fail to see how manned space exploration in its current form represents a real, rather than a symbolic, advance for our society; and we are entering a stage when we will no longer have the luxury of substituting one for the other.