A waste of space?

Broadly speaking, there are two types of people on this planet. There are those who believe that the future of humanity lies here on earth, and there are those who believe it lies out in space. Stephen Hawking is one of the latter. One of the world's most celebrated scientists is certain that we have no alternative but to ship out. Life on earth, says Hawking, is at ever greater risk of being wiped out by threats like nuclear war or a genetically engineered virus.

Those who believe in space exploration, such as Hawking, say that humanity needs to be preparing for departure right now, and that governments ought to be spending more money on this. But this view has yet to prevail. Man's biggest player in space exploration, Nasa, celebrates its 50th anniversary this October. But a look back over its history shows how difficult it is, politically and financially, to sustain government-backed space exploration.

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Nasa's achievements are not in doubt. As Stephen Dick, Nasa's historian, has said, "Nasa's astronauts have circled the world, walked on the moon, piloted the first winged spacecraft and constructed the international space station. Its robotic spacecraft have studied earth, visited all the planets, imaged the universe at many wavelengths and peered back to the beginnings of time."

Today's governments may talk up their space ambitions, but they are less willing to cough up. During the Apollo era, as much as 4 per cent of the US federal budget was devoted to Nasa. In today's money, this would mean the US committing $1 trillion to space. Yet even Nasa's relatively tiny budget of $17bn shocks non-believers, who can't understand why so much money is being spent on space when there are so many more pressing issues at home.



For years, the British government has been a firm non-believer. Even on a European scale, very little is spent on training astronauts, and none on building vehicles capable of putting humans into space. But all this could change as space exploration strategies are reviewed; Nicolas Sarkozy has announced that it is time to "shake up" the European Space Agency and make it more like Nasa by giving it political direction. British ministers are also muttering about the possibility of more home-grown astronauts.

Apollo aside, Nasa's most notable successes have been in space science—broadly speaking, the study of planets, stars and galaxies. This might mean landing rovers on Mars or pointing the Hubble telescope into the furthest reaches of the universe. Nasa devotes about a third of its $17bn budget to space science, of which $1.5bn goes on the earth sciences—which includes missions investigating climate change, weather patterns and natural hazards. Most of the rest is spent on flying the space shuttle and completing the space station (which many view as a $100bn white elephant).

Yet despite Nasa's triumphs, many of the believers in space exploration feel it has failed to deliver on the "vision." After decades of exploration and hundreds of billions of dollars, humans have barely slipped the surly bonds of earth. Almost all of the 450 humans who have entered space have remained a few hundred kilometres above the planet's surface. Only the two dozen Apollo astronauts who visited the moon between 1969 and 1972 have ventured further.

The problem is that the space exploration vision varies depending on whom you talk to. The initial vision of going to the moon certainly owed far more to politics than to any starry-eyed idea about humanity's future, no matter what space enthusiasts now claim. When the Russians launched the world's first satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957, America deemed it important to demonstrate the superiority of space technology in a free society. As Michael Griffin, the head of Nasa, puts it, the moon project was touted as "a vindication of the very concept of freedom." That was why it was possible to mobilise such large amounts of money and political support. But behind the scenes, President Kennedy was interested in Apollo only as a test of the capitalist system. By 1963, its expense was leading him to rethink the whole programme. He wondered out loud before the UN general assembly whether the US and the Soviet Union ought to be involved in such duplications of research and construction. But after he was shot, the political race to the moon continued to be pursued as his legacy.

This illustrates the problem that has been with Nasa throughout its 50 years. There is no real scientific justification for its focus on human space exploration, which takes up the largest part of its budget. This leaves a vacuum ready to be filled by politicians. In 2004, President Bush announced that Nasa would resume manned missions to the moon by 2020, "with the goal of living and working there" and using the moon "as the launching point for missions beyond." He also hinted at plans for a manned mission to Mars. This was an easy way for Bush to burnish his image as a leader; he could set out Nasa's purpose for decades to come, safe in the knowledge that his administration wouldn't be around to pay most of the bills. But this leaves Nasa scurrying around trying to find a way of setting along its new path, while knowing that it could be kicked in an entirely new direction when the next president comes along.

In his book New Moon Rising, the space writer Frank Sietzen argues that prior to the Columbia space shuttle accident in 2003, Nasa had no long-range purpose and not enough money. Now, he says, it does have a long-range vision in the new moon programme, but still not enough money. If Nasa's budget is not increased next year, predicts Sietzen, the organisation will face the unpleasant prospect of trimming infrastructure and programmes. The cost of the Constellation programme—the next-generation spacecraft for human spaceflight, which will replace the shuttle—will rise, he adds, and there is no wriggle room in the budget. Worse still, Nasa is caught in a difficult corner with the shuttle retirement in 2010. Constellation won't begin flights until at least 2015; during the intervening five years, Nasa is supposed to be reaching the space station by buying access on Russian rockets. But now, with the Russian invasion of Georgia, US politicians are in no mood to go on a spending mission to Moscow.

A further problem is that every year, Nasa's budget is subject to hundreds of millions of dollars of political "earmarks"—money directed to specific local projects by individual congressional legislators. For instance, in 2006, $4m went on research to improve health through nanotechnology in Houston, while another $4.5m was given to an automatic design software project. Neither of these align with Nasa's priorities. In 1997, Nasa paid out $74m for six earmarks, but by 2006 political meddling had taken this to a record $568m, covering almost 200 projects. This might give Sarkozy pause for thought in his attempt to politicise the European Space Agency.

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How can Nasa achieve its expensive, long-term goals of setting up a moon base by 2020—and sending humans to Mars in the 2030s—in such an unstable political environment? Griffin's answer is robust: "If I stop, then I am making a tacit admission that the pursuit of useful, long-term goals is incompatible with democratic society. And I don't accept that premise." Asked whether it might be better for the science side of Nasa to be hived off into a separate organisation, Griffin says that without human exploration, the science side of Nasa would be "a shadow of itself." This is a political point: Nasa's science budget is almost as big as that of America's National Science Foundation. Without the fluffier but politically appealing human space exploration, Nasa would not have the federal money to spend on science.

Griffin does not try to justify the human space flight programme in terms of economic returns to society (others have attempted to do so, but with little success). In fact, what he would most like for Nasa's 50th birthday—other than more money, of course—is a recognition among policymakers and the public that not everything that is worthwhile can be justified on the balance sheet. If previous generations had not expanded the frontiers of human exploration, he says, humanity would still be living in east Africa: "We are the return on investment of our forebears." To Griffin, Nasa—whose budget is around 0.7 per cent of the overall federal budget—represents a tiny portion of society's resources invested for the future.

But this doesn't lead to the conclusion that governments should pay for exploration. Early African hominids didn't find themselves taxed so that a select group of walkers could advance. To his credit, Griffin has supported private sector investment. One ongoing Nasa programme finances companies to demonstrate that they can fly goods to the space station, in the hope that one day this job can be contracted to the private sector. Another promising new scheme is Centennial Challenges, which offers cash prizes for solutions to engineering problems like building machines to excavate lunar soil or to beam power wirelessly. Last year, an engineer in Maine won $200,000 for the first stage of a contest to design a new astronaut glove. These challenges engage a wider part of society in space issues, and encourage the private sector to invest—and a crisis in access to the space station might spur further private efforts. But progress in encouraging private sector involvement has generally been slow.

At the moment, most private sector space projects are focused on sub-orbital tourist trips, in which spacecraft reach space but do not complete an orbital revolution of the earth. While the British government twiddles its thumbs over sending state-funded astronauts into space, a British company, Virgin Galactic, is likely to create more sub-orbital astronauts in the next decade than the world's governments have managed in the last half century. The company aims to begin manned flights in 2010, and space is now available for very wealthy individuals, as well as governments. On top of its other benefits, this kind of private involvement finally allows for a satisfactory answer to the question of why humans should travel into space. "Because it is there," is an answer only possible when one is spending one's own money.

Fifty years on, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Nasa's great victory—Apollo—actually undermined its very reason for existence. Once the Russians had been beaten, Nasa had to continually struggle for relevance and funding. And the idea that once spurred it on—freedom—today provides the organisation with one of its biggest challenges. In a democracy, people are free to question the way governments spend money, and politicians are free to twist the vision to suit themselves. Nasa's model should serve as a warning, rather than a blueprint, for how to do space exploration.

According to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, Nasa's future lies in collaborative innovation. In a lecture at the start of 2008, Schmidt exhorted Nasa to engage society more, partly through its design competitions, but also through creating open systems to which others can contribute. Google itself is increasingly involved in the space sector, through its work on Google Earth, its moon and Mars visualisation programmes—which use Nasa data—and its recent deal with satellite company GeoEye for sole rights to images from its GeoEye-1 orbiter. It is also offering its own $30m prize to land and drive a robot over the moon.

And as for the two visions of humanity's future, perhaps they can be in some sense be reconciled. There are always those who will look towards the next horizon, while others will be content to stay at home. But it may be that both are possible. Nasa's vision of grand exploration by the few faces an uphill struggle for relevance in a society where everyone wants to be involved. In only ten years, phones and computers will be 100 times as powerful as they are today. By the time Nasa gets to the moon again, the public may have walked, flown and explored virtually for themselves, thanks to Google and its kin. They will be watching sunsets on Mars long before humans ever set foot there, and space tourism in low-earth orbit will be provided by the private sector.

Human space exploration will only win support in a democracy if it can provide worthwhile knowledge. The problem is that space travel offers most of its benefits to the few that actually travel, or to some imagined future race of humans. But the revolution in information technology shows how Nasa can adapt and survive. Every aspect of a return to the moon, from design to flights, needs to be opened up in the way that Google has opened up satellite mapping—so that if Nasa ever does make it back to the moon, the taxpayer will be able to enjoy, virtually, every aspect of the ride.