Would you — and each member of your family and your friends — spend $1.50 over the next five years to get a look at Halley's comet when it next comes by, in 1986?
Why We Must Explore Outer Space
Many people I know would, and if past public interest in the solar system, and in comets in particular, is any guide, so would most Americans. But you won’t get a chance to. The comet will be faint, and the only way to get a good look at it will be through the eyes of a spacecraft.
Plans to explore Halley’s comet have been canceled in the latest round of budget cuts. We shall thus watch the Soviet Union, Japan, and a consortium of European nations all send spacecraft to the comet-spacecraft less capable than what we could have launched. We shall see the comet through the eyes of foreign spacecraft while the United States sits on the sidelines because of its unwillingness to spend thirty cents per year per citizen.
This cancellation is just a part of the generally woeful state of our civilian space program. Over the past decade, while other
budgets have increased, NASA’s has remained the same; allowing for inflation, NASA is spending about a third of what it did in 1965. Other nations have not been idle, and what happened to Detroit is about to happen to our civilian space program.
A common misconception is that the NASA budget is second in size only to that of the Department of Defense. In fact, an amount equal to NASA’s entire yearly budget is spent by the Defense Department in less than two weeks. Regardless of whether or not you favor spending more on defense, social programs, or any other project, even totally abolishing the space program would not add materially to these causes or decrease taxes per citizen by more than the cost of a dinner and a movie. Yet to reduce the funding by even a fraction of this amount will seriously jeopardize our ability to compete economically in the world.
Read this sentence carefully. Those four words bear the same ratio to all the words in this column of type as NASA’s budget does to the national budget, less than 1 percent. Even in tight economic times a great nation must be willing to invest this much of its resources on the future — or it will have no future. To reduce scientific research now is to eat our seed corn in a time of famine.
Americans will have to see Halley’s comet through the eyes of foreign spacecraft while the United States sits on the sidelines because of an unwillingness to spend thirty cents per citizen for the next five years.
We are living on past glories. The recent spectacular photographs of Saturn are from a mission launched almost a decade ago. We have built a space shuttle-a great achievement, to be sure-but for political reasons have underfunded it. To ensure its completion, past administrations have taken from other parts of NASA’s budget; budget crunches of the past have thus crunched the research-and-development side of NASA. The political attitude of the Carter administration toward space was reminiscent of a remark by Calvin Coolidge in the early days of aeronautics: “Why can’t we buy just one airplane and let the aviators take turns flying it?”
Today the Department of Defense’s space budget is larger than NASA’s; NASA launches more rockets for outside customers — including the Defense Department — than for itself, and altogether we launch only about an eighth as many satellites as the Soviet Union does. The reasons why we should vigorously pursue a strong national civilian space program are many:
- Useful knowledge: communications satellites are so widely used that we cannot now do without them. Remote sensing satellites find oil, minerals, and fish, detect pollution, and Monitor crops. Weather satellites improve forecasting and warn of big storms. Space technology produces such spin-offs as better suits for firefighters, X-ray machines that expose a patient to a smaller dose of radiation, pacemakers that keep people alive, radios that you can carry in your pocket, and hundreds of other items. Civilian research also yields military hardware, which improves our national defense.
- Employment and economics: the aerospace field is hungry for qualified employees. About the only sector of U.S. industry that shows evidence of increased productivity is high technology, including aerospace; this is also one of the very few sectors in which the balance of foreign trade is in our favor. M.I.T. economics professor Robert Solow has demonstrated that half of the growth of U.S. productivity is attributable to the advance of scientific knowledge. This comes only from research, often from basic research, where we don’t even know exactly what we are looking for.
- Adventure: our people thrive on a frontier; that is how this nation grew. We have explored all of our world; now space offers an infinite frontier and a new sphere of activity for the human race, if we but choose to use it. While adventure, frontier spirit, and spiritual expansion are hard to document or to put dollar figures on, they are vitally important to our national well-being. The Russians realize this. They boast that the Soviet Union is ‘the shore of the cosmic ocean,’ while at the same time the United States remains landlocked.
There are several opportunities for private-sector efforts in space. But if we reduce funding to the point where NASA is no longer able to carry on long-term research and development, there will be no new technology for these private companies to pick up. Such A and D is something that private companies can’t afford, because of the high costs and long payoff times. America became great in part by subsidizing the building of the railroads across the nation and by subsidizing the development of the aviation industry, which now carries us around the globe. We should do the same in space. Everyone will benefit from the investment.
A large number of people in the country favor a strong civilian space program. Polls show that the public thinks the space shuttle is a great achievement, that 41 percent(!) would like to fly in space, and that research and technology can help solve economic and environmental problems. A large part of the populace believes that we should spend the present amount or more on space research, and these are the people who pay most of the taxes and are also most likely to vote in an election. Hundreds of thousands show up to watch both the shuttle’s launching and its landing; millions more watch pictures transmitted by Voyager from Saturn. Yet when 10,000 letters come in from citizens to the White House urging a comet mission, they are boxed up and sent over to NASA to be answered. For some reason the administration doesn’t listen.
This is strange when you consider the following promise from the 1980 Republican Party Platform: “Underfunding of beneficial government-sponsored research efforts in basic and applied scientific research has disrupted the benefits of years of effective effort. In particular, America’s preeminence in the exploration of space is threatened by the failure of the Carter administration to fund fully the space shuttle … as well as advanced exploration programs. Republicans pledge to support a vigorous space research program.”
But, as they say, political platforms are for running on, not for standing on. Or, as economist John Maynard Keynes observed decades ago, “The public [are) always ready for anything and are as good as gold about it. It is the bloody politicians whose bloody minds have not been sufficiently prepared for anything unfamiliar to their ancestors.
Neither officials in NASA, nor most members of Congress, nor the administration, think that the public cares enough about science and space exploration to speak out. We need to tell the president that even in tight economic times we are willing to invest this small amount of our money to explore, to develop, and to participate in the grand adventure of probing this new frontier. We’ve seen how the relatively small cost repays many-fold in economic and spiritual ways. If you agree, let the president know and let your elected representatives know, too. If you don’t speak out now, don’t bitch a few years from now when American companies have to depend on foreign launch services, or even have to buy their satellites abroad. If we continue to reduce the space budget and other research budgets from their already low levels, we will in many important ways become a second-class nation.
It’s your choice. And the time to decide is now.
The author is Executive Director of the National Space Institute. a nonprofit private organization. He is a former chairman of New York City’s Hoyden Planetarium and is a contributing editor to Omni magazine.
Full disclosure, we take some pleasure in re-running “the sky is falling” editorials from 40+ years ago, because, well, walk outside: Still have the sky. … Because we were curious, though, we looked it up, and for the 2026 fiscal year, the NASA budget represented 0.35% of the federal one. Because we have a directive to at least endeavor not to be horribly controversial — and we really try hard not to be idiots — we have left out other statistics on what the federal government chooses to spend money on instead. But you can look. … Seriously, what’s a gnat catcher?
