Plenty of lovely surprises have arrived at my home between the covers of National Geographic; but perhaps the least expected was finding that John Updike – the whimsical author of numerous quirky novels – was moved to wax lyrically about the discoveries that astronomers and planetary scientists are making with space probes and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Last December's issue carried an Updike essay about the last four centuries of Mars exploration, from humanity's first telescopic views of the Red Planet's dusty surface to panchromatic panoramas of cliffsides and craters that NASA's twin rovers have beamed back from that surface.
Updike's essay – possibly his last - deserves mention on its own merits. But in truth I was moved to write this post because of a letter that Colombian correspondent Darwin Torres-Castillo sent to the editors of National Geographic. Torres-Castillo feels that "Our 'heroic' efforts to study Mars and outer space seem to be misplaced, since the direct beneficiaries of this heroism are only two groups: the industrial establishment that produces the hardware for these explorations, and a privileged class of scientists.”
No doubt about it: scientists have gotten used to indulging their curiosity at public expense, at least in much of the developed world and especially in the United States. How did this come about? The reasons are many; but in the fields I have worked (physics and astronomy) the Space Race and the Cold War played a key role.
Masters of mysteries that few could comprehend, physicists (and to a lesser extent astronomers) have long been able count on public funding for their research. After all, if speculating about the very nature of space and time, or probing the anatomy of atoms, could lead to a weapon that could flatten entire cities in a split second, who knew what might come of similar future investigations? And if the rockets that could deliver a Sputnik into orbit could also deliver these weapons to enemies on the other side of the globe, what imperialist superpower would willingly cede outer space to its adversaries?
The United States, having beaten the rest of the world to the first successful atomic blasts, was not about assume second place behind the likes of the Soviet Union, which had beaten it into outer space. And so a generation of physicists in the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and a few other places found its research generously funded. Many pursued their research out of a pure love of knowledge; but lurking in the shadows there always was an expectation – sometimes explicit, sometimes unspoken - that public support created a debt to be paid by cooperating with the nation's military and intelligence operations.
So where does this digression leave us vis a vis Torres-Castillo's chief complaint – that the business of exploring outer space benefits only contractors (who get public funds for building space probes) and the scientists (who get terabytes of data with which to explore the genesis of galaxies or the weathering of planets)?
As I said on a talk-show radio interview a dozen years ago, I by no means feel that we are obliged to unconditionally spend all that we do on space exploration; many other pressing needs make legitimate claim on hard-earned tax dollars.
But, as I also pointed out then, people from all walks of life are genuinely curious about our place in space and are genuinely moved by the sometimes eerie, often beautiful images that telescopes and spacecraft are churning out by the daily dozen. And now, thanks to the Internet, those images are available for people from all walks of life, in detail unimaginable to those of us who saw the first Viking vistas of Mars's surface as grainy newpaper photos.
No doubt about it - we need to closely scrutinize the claims that defense contractors and research scientists make upon public resources. But it's simply wrong to say that no one else benefits from the enterprise of exploring space. Spend a few online hours exploring the web pages of NASA's Mars missions, the Hubble Space Telescope, or the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn, and see if you agree.
P.S. Two fascinating books I read in recent months detail different aspects of the U.S.'s intertwined enterprises of military conquest and scientific research. M. G. Lord's Astro Turf is the autobiography of a woman whose childhood was shaped by her father's involvement in the American rocketry program; Ann Finkbeiner's The Jasons details a shadowy group of physicists, ostensibly truth-seekers, who helped the U.S. pursue goals as diverse as the Vietnam War and space-based missile defense.
Copyright 2009 Joshua Roth.