The last frontier?
Stellar cluster NGC 2467 in southern constellation of Puppis
By Douglas Mackinnon
As most of us who have worked in and around politics for any length
of time know, if a certain issue is not an immediate vote-getter or
“tangible” for a politician, there is a better than even chance that the
issue will be ignored or deposited upon the furthest back-burner.
For
many of our elected officials, everyday political calculation comes
down to this: “What’s best for my re-election and what’s best for my
party?” In that order. With fewer and fewer people in power whose first
thought is: “What’s the best decision I can make that will be in the
best interests of my constituents?” It’s no wonder that more young
people are giving up on politics while their elders abandon the
political parties to become Independents.
While the if-it’s-not-tangible-and-I-can’t-game-it-immediately-to-my-benefit test
may be great for a politician, it’s often very bad for the country.
“Tangible” being political slang for “that federal office building will
now be located in my district.”
As for the “non-tangible,” a great example would be our space program.
Or to be more accurate, our non-space program. It has never really been
relevant for most of our politicians or presidents. The truth is that
only one president really thought that space exploration was a tangible
national vote-getter.
Whatever his real motivation, on Sept.12, 1962 at Rice University,
John F. Kennedy stated in no uncertain terms that in the interests of
science, industry and national security, the United States would become
the “world’s leading spacefaring nation.” And so we did – for nearly
five decades.
Today, that preeminence
is nothing more than a fading memory. While President Obama - who as a
candidate made it very clear that he valued education over space
exploration - may have pushed our human spaceflight program over the
cliff, other presidents led it to the edge.
With Florida a key
battleground state in the presidential election, the White House and the
political appointees at NASA will argue furiously that the president
has not walked away from our human space program. They will point to his
plans
to land astronauts on the asteroids one day. Right. That goal, exactly like George H.W. Bush’s plan in 1989 to send astronauts to Mars, is simply fiction.
I
worked in politics for a long time, but I began life as a space geek. I
started a scrapbook on the Soviet space program when I was 10 and
decades later got to write a book about the 12 men who have walked on
the moon. After my time in government, I worked as a consultant for NASA
and the Space Shuttle team. In other words, I admit that I have always
been a fan of humans in space. Any humans in space.
That said, the humans who are now winning the space race come from
the People’s Republic of China. It is clear from their own propaganda
that China means to replace us as the “world’s leading spacefaring
nation.”
It has been argued in the past that while the United
States and other Western nations see the future in terms of months or
years, the Chinese see it in terms of decades or even centuries. With
that perspective in mind, the Chinese government intends to win not the
space race, but the space marathon. They intend to take military,
industrial and scientific advantage there.
After the just completed launch and recovery of China’s first female astronaut -
Liu Yang,
who with two male astronauts, was part of a very successful 13 day
mission to dock with a Chinese space station - many in the media covered
it as a human-interest story or even a politically correct equal-rights
story. Nice, but the completely wrong way to view the Chinese
achievement.
Naïve and irresponsible beliefs aside, China’s space
program is essentially military. Its every function is designed to carry
out a military objective or one that improves the welfare of the
state. Nothing else matters to the Chinese leadership.
Toward that
end, the Chinese government has been investing a great deal of time and
talent in a wide range of anti-satellite weapons and technologies.
Aside from direct ascent kinetic kill vehicles (like
the one it tested in 2007), the Chinese military space program is also working on laser, jamming, microwave and cyber-weapons.
Why? Because the Chinese leadership - the same leadership that has
made hacking our military and commercial computers a priority -
understands that no nation on earth is more dependent for its overall
survival on its satellites than the United States. Satellites control
our military communications, our financial transactions and our
day-to-day lives. What if they went dark or were destroyed in orbit?
The
Chinese leaders - and others - would certainly say that a military
advantage in space is “tangible” and a goal worth attaining. But
preeminence is space is about much more than military advantage. Neil
deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American
Museum of Natural History in New York, outlined that argument when he
told Popular Science earlier this year:
If China sets up a permanent base on the moon, and tries to explore Mars
on a time scale shorter than ours, that will be another space race. I
am just certain of it. I am trying to get people to do this without
having to view it as an act of war, or an act of a response to an
adversary. One way is because of economics; the government could do
this, and they could say, “The economic return is the scientists and
technologists who invent the new tomorrow.” Space exploration is the
carrot that incites people to become scientifically literate. So I view
it as an economic development plan.
Maybe it’s time for the president and his Republican opponent to elevate a few issues to the “tangible”
list regardless of personal or partisan self-interest. As China launches
military satellite after military satellite while declaring its
intention to colonize the moon, maybe preeminence in space should be one
of them.
The president should dust off those plans. Given the fact that during the height of the war in Iraq, our government was
spending nearly a billion dollars a day,
I suspect the American people would support spending a month’s worth of
that budget every year to ensure that our assets in space and our
future on earth are more secure. But to support it, they first need to
be convinced of its importance. So do our leaders.
About the author:
Douglas MacKinnon was a press secretary to former Senator
Bob Dole. He was also a writer for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush
and a special assistant for policy and communications in the Defense
Department. He is the author, most recently, of a memoir, Rolling Pennies in the Dark.
