swaglikepg

I recently picked up NDG’s new book, Space Chronicles, and the first few chapters reminded me of some arguments Peter Thiel made during Thursday’s debate. He opines that that technological innovation is on the decline (specifically citing transportation, energy, and medicine), and that this deceleration is a result of increased government regulation of tech, public fears, and a growing hostility to “any sort of innovation”. 

Might this be a result of deep blows to what was once the vanguard of human exploration? Even at the height of the space race, NASA’s funding was only around 4 cents on every tax dollar. Four cents! Enough to not only put a man on the moon, but also inspire humanity, employ hundreds of thousands, and spark innovations that we use and benefit from every day. 

After four decades, NASA’s funding is down to half a cent on the dollar, and we’ve lost not only the ability to land on the moon, but also our ability to get to low earth orbit. Forget driving innovation or even sustaining it - we’re losing our spaceflight capabilities altogether! 

There are those who ask, “why go to space when we have all these problems on earth?” Though the philosophical motivation is certainly valid - which Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell puts so eloquently:

“[In space] you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

The pragmatic reasons are even stronger. Though it’s hard to overstate spaceflight’s role in fields like medicine, energy, materials, and electronics, a particularly cogent example comes from Hubble. When Hubble launched, flaws in the mirror resulted in severe spherical aberration until a repair mission was flown three years later. In the interim, deconvolution algorithms were developed to try and salvage what we could, and it turns out that this imaging technology could just as well be adapted for imaging in medicine. 

Economy down? Jobs being outsourced? Losing our technological proficiency? Educational attainment dropping? In losing NASA, not only have we lost a major employer (especially for those technical jobs - exactly the ones that can’t be outsourced) and a huge driver for the economy, we’ve also lost our collective inspiration and spirit of innovation. 

All of these piecemeal symptoms that we see and feel: the nation is going broke; we don’t have as many scientists; their jobs are going over seas; all of this, they’re not just isolated incidents, they are part of an absence of an ambition that comes about when you take on those grand challenges. 

- The Costs of Cutting Nasa’s Budget

Posted at 6:34am and tagged with: nasa, neil degrasse tyson, space, spaceflight, two column, essays,.