Recently, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, renowned astronomer and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson made the case that space is our next frontier, and by seizing it we can step forward into the future. Once again, the viscerally motivated ‘Reverend’ Neil deGrasse Tyson has said something difficult to appreciate on television, much like his impeccable tie collection. Before we get started; Dr. Tyson, your depiction of the Saturn V rocket, America’s hot-rod to the moon, in tie-form did not go unappreciated, sir. Interestingly, in this discussion, Bill Maher became the skeptic, and questioned how exactly one does “build the economy of tomorrow”? Newt Gingrich’s space colony? Dr. Tyson declared that Gingrich was thinking way too small with just a moon colony.
“Kennedy made a more audacious statement than Gingrich did. When we didn’t have a vehicle that wouldn’t kill you by going into orbit, and he says in eight years we are going to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely to Earth. And yet Gingrich, after we’ve already been to the moon, says, in his eight years he just wants to build a colony there. That’s not audacious, in the scheme of ambitious ideas of what we could do in space.” Neil pauses to let Maher inquire about specific things NASA has done for us. “I’m not even gonna list the spin-offs. It transformed the culture of the United States of America in that decade to be one of innovation and discovery. And when you have that as part of your culture, you innovate. When you innovate, you are responsible for birthing entire new economies that drive your nation’s wealth. During that decade, there were no jobs going overseas, because they didn’t know how to do what it is we were innovating. When you stop innovating, then everyone catches up and of course the jobs go overseas.”
And now, even more interestingly, General Motors executive Bob Lutz jumps in with, “It’s mankind’s fundamental drive to explore. Look at Europe when they sent the explorer’s across the Atlantic. It is something that is part of our humanity.” Hearing this from a man with such weight in the auto industry gives me such a fire in my belly. In my lifetime, I want to see GM roll out a line of space traveling vehicles. There are many ways to do this, let’s start trying them all! You want to reinvent the American Automotive Industry? Tell them you want to go from zero to orbit in no more than five minutes. I bet there are some sympathetic minds at NASA who would be willing to collaborate.
Yet the question still stands. What does a moon colony get us? The best answer is we aren’t even sure yet, but we have a good idea. Up until the space program, everything we have ever known about space and non-Earth anything has been through the lenses of our atmosphere. Light interacts with it, asteroids melt passing through it, and when we bring anything back that used to exist without an atmosphere, it is suddenly subjected to one. So, much like how Columbus couldn’t truly see around the curvature of the Earth and spot India, he used the best resources of the time and went for a first-hand account. So we won’t really know until we start collecting the resources in their natural environment. What we can expect to find really depends on what we think the moon is. In 1902, most children were sure the moon was made of cheese. Since then, science and education has caught up.
Current theory for the formation of the moon is that a Mars-sized object struck the proto-Earth when it was still a condensing ball of magma. The collision sent the innards of the planet into orbit around the rest as it simply settled back into a smaller sphere. Then, just like how the Earth formed from a collection of rocks in orbit around the sun, the moon formed from the rocks orbiting the Earth. However, unlike the Earth, it never warmed up enough inside to create a dynamo like we did. The solar wind is constantly bathing our solar system in high energy particles that are at various stages of atomic fusion. We know that the Earth’s magnetic field shields us from most of this, but our moon is not so lucky. It’s surface has been continuously bombarded with Hydrogen, Helium-3, and a smörgåsbord of other atoms. These are the very materials with which we are trying to power our next economy with. Potentially, the moon is a massive collection of primordial elements and space dust that we aren’t even trying to use.
Neil brings us back to Earth, quickly. “There are other motives there too, though. Queen Isabella said, ‘Columbus, you might be an explorer and a discoverer, but take these Spanish flags with you wherever you park ship.’ So, you can have geopolitical drivers for this. What I’d like is this fleet of launch vehicles, where we can just choose which destination we want, for whatever reason that drives it; it could be scientific, it could be touristic, it could be geopolitical. And that way, the solar system becomes our back yard, and to advance this space frontier you have to innovate when you do something tomorrow that you did not do today. That is the culture I want to resurrect from that golden era of space exploration.” The moon is just the tip of the iceberg. We have many destinations lined up already with varied rewards.
- Mars was a planet that lived and died long before we showed up, and by investigating it now we might be able to find ways to eke out existences on dead planets, or even reverse the processes and bring them back to life.
- The asteroid belt was all of the makings of a planet that failed to come together due to Jupiter’s tidal influences, making it a possible treasure trove of metals, minerals, and radioactive elements all trapped in relatively bite-sized nuggets.
- Transcending the Earth, and making the rings of Saturn or the seas of Europa a tourist destination. One day visiting the increasingly long list of extra-solar planets and other-Earths we are finding in the habitable zone.
So, let’s have a grown up discussion about building spaceships and stop treating NASA’s mission like its some expensive, pipe-dream. According to Dr. Tyson, all it would take is a double of the space program’s budget from half a penny to a whole penny on the tax dollar and we would be on the moon, mining asteroids, and exploring our new backyard. “One last thing,” concludes Neil, “the miniaturization of electronics was not the first thought of people that had radios as furniture in their living room. The miniaturization was driven by NASA because you have to shave weight and size to put something into space.” Who knows how technology will develop to meet the new demands we place upon them?
One thing is certain, though. It was five hundred years ago when we extended the bounds of the known world to the point where they over-lapped on the reverse of our planet. Since then we have found ways to extract energy from above and below us, have achieved marvels of engineering on the surface of the planet, and now we are becoming hungry again for a new frontier. Imagine if Jefferson decided not to buy Louisiana because it was too expensive at three cents an acre. Who else will catch up and surpass us with the same dream? I wonder if China would let us piggy-back into space.