We Need Our Space
Space technology is a necessary investment
In late 2012, Hurricane Sandy killed 286 people, including 117 in the United States. Its effects enveloped millions more in six countries. At one point, winds from the storm battered an area more than 1,000 miles wide. Twenty-four US states felt Sandy’s wrath in one form or another. In addition to the lives taken, the storm cost more than $50 billion, which makes it one of the most costly natural disasters in American history, second only to Katrina.
Costly as Sandy was in both lives and money, without the constellation of weather imaging satellites at our command the impact of the storm could have been much, much worse. Accurate forecasting of major storms is crucial for protecting life and property. Our ability to track, and more importantly project, the path of a major storm such as Sandy leans heavily on satellite imagery. Satellites and the computer models their images feed allow for reasonably accurate storm predictions within about a five-day window. This warning time allows emergency response and other public agencies to take proper measures and warn the public, provided they choose to act.
Absent such space-based resources, forecasting models would suffer—for example, without satellite data, forecasts of the 2010 blizzard that walloped the Washington, D.C. area would have missed the mark by half, massively underestimating the strength of the storm.
But the weather satellites so critical to storm prediction are aging and may die before replacements can be orbited, even though their geriatric nature has been well known for years. These satellites fly polar orbits, imaging longitudinal swaths of the Earth below, one swipe at a time. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) plan to orbit the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) as replacements, but the launch of the first JPSS satellite, is behind schedule and the US Government Accountability Office now projects and 11 month gap in backup coverage should the current system fail before JPSS can be brought online. To bridge this gap, NOAA is currently working on an interim spacecraft, called Earth Observing Nanosatellite-Microwave. The inability to replace such critical systems in a timely way bespeaks a lack of clear priorities, realistic funding and, most of all, political leadership.
The need for accurate weather forecasting, vital as it may be, is but one obvious example. The security and the economic health of the world have never been more dependent on objects flying in space. Space systems have become part of the critical national infrastructure for many countries; Earthly services that now depend on satellites for the completion of every day tasks are ubiquitous. Public and commercial services, disaster prediction and response, rescue operations, management of agriculture and other natural resources, global finance, communications, transportation, navigation and all manner of military operations have been transformed by our use of space since the 1960s.
In the 1950s, with human activity in space on the horizon, Hungarian-American aeronautical engineer Theodore von Kármán worked out where to mark the edge of space — not a simple task since the atmosphere doesn’t simply end at some point. Rather, it fades away as one ventures further from the Earth’s surface. But Kármán had some help. Some four centuries earlier, Sir Isaac Newton had (pretty accurately) calculated the speed at which an object could be maintained in Earth orbit — orbital velocity. With Newton’s shoulders to stand on, Kármán determined that above 100 kilometers (62 miles) the air became so thin that an aircraft would have to fly at orbital velocity — 17,300 mph — to remain aloft. This boundary, in essence the point where flight becomes spaceflight, has since been known as the Kármán Line.
Flight beyond the Kármán Line has enabled the rise of global services. Arguably, there are now four global utilities: the Global Positioning System (GPS), Russia’s version of GPS, called Globalnaya Navigatsionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema (GLONASS), the Internet and the United States Space Surveillance Network (SSN). Three of the four, GPS, GLONASS and the SSN, would not be possible without human activity in space and the SSN would not be necessary without it. Two more global positioning systems are in the works, Europe’s Galileo and China’s BeiDou, while others such as Turkey and India are fielding regional systems.
GPS and GLONASS were built for military use, though civilian use of GPS has become pervasive. Beyond getting drivers to their destinations, civilian GPS enables any number of other commonplace functions, from helping first responders take the shortest route to an emergency, to creating safer and more fuel efficient trans-oceanic jet travel, to saving billions of dollars in fuel costs for the US trucking industry.
America’s 2010 National Space Policy notes that “Space systems allow people and governments around the world to see with clarity, communicate with certainty, navigate with accuracy and operate with assurance.” Moreover, exploration and investment in space produce real terrestrial gains and “life on Earth is far better as a result.”
Space is a solid investment
Space activities not only make life better, they have been a good investment. The return on investment (ROI) in space touches so many fields in so many ways that determining its precise value can be elusive. Moreover the ROI in space has changed significantly as the space age has evolved. Some benefits, like those above, are tangible while others are more ephemeral. Many studies published from the 1960s to the 1980s agree that America’s early investment in NASA had meaningful economic benefits. Henry R. Hertzfeld of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, has said that “no one measure is a comprehensive indicator of NASA impacts and benefits. There are many things we just do better thanks to space investment, big things,” including telecommunications.
A Denver Research Institute study concluded that investment in space allowed “technological advancement to occur at an earlier time than it would have occurred otherwise,” if indeed it would have happened at all. A Midwest Research Institute study is more specific. Looking at the overall relationship between research and development spending and technology-related increases in US GNP (the common measure at the time, as opposed to the current measure of GDP) the MRI study found that every dollar spent on space-related R&D returned more than seven dollars in GNP over the following eighteen years. If one assumes, as MRI does, that space-related R&D spending by NASA alone (not counting Pentagon spending) has at least the same ROI as other R&D, then the $25 billion (in 1958 dollars) that NASA spent on the civil space program from 1959 to 1969 returned $52 billion by 1970 and $181 billion by 1987.
As governor of California, Ronald Reagan had seen first-hand the positive impact the space program had on technological and economic development in his state. In 1970 he predicted that “the many uses of space technology will make our investment in space as big a bargain as that voyage of Columbus which cost (one assumes, the equivalent of ) $7,000 — and which was denounced as a foolish extravagance.” Later, as president, he was a bit more cost sensitive though he did green-light what would eventually become the International Space Station, the most expensive object ever created, at around $150 billion.
John Kennedy, in his last public remarks on November 21, 1963 noted that “Many Americans make the mistake of assuming that space research has no value here on earth. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just as the wartime development of radar gave us the transistor, and all that it made possible, so research in space medicine holds the promise of substantial benefit for those of us who are earthbound.”
Dr. Paul Kaminski, chairman of the Defense Science Board, argues that America’s return on investment in space technology was once signifiant, as the MRI study seems to confirm. Kaminski says that the Apollo program and the military rocket programs (such as the Minuteman missile) that accompanied it “drove our whole research and technology base” in the 1960s and 70s. In particular, “the quest for performance and miniaturization and the like actually created the foundation for our whole semiconductor industry.” The return on America’s investment in Apollo and Minuteman Kaminski concludes, was “enormous.”
Today, Kaminski notes that space investments retain a positive ROI, but to a more subtle degree. “The investments we are making in space capabilities certainly do have some spinoffs and some enablers for other applications, but the spinoffs are much less. So the overall return on investment to the economy is a small part of what it was in the 60s and 70s,” Kaminski says. This is largely because the technological environment today has changed dramatically. Spacecraft can be built with more commonplace, commercially-available components in many instances. The long development time of spacecraft and the need for components to be space-rated (meaning they can survive in the hostile environment of space) is glacial compared with the lightning speed of technological advancement on the ground. As a result, space assets are often fielded using technologies that are two to three generations behind the state of the art. Exceptions include apertures, optics and antenna that are not commercially available, such as those used in military reconnaissance and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Investment beyond the numbers
Long before forecasting and other satellite-based services became so embedded into daily life on the ground, NASA’s Ernst Stuhlinger, writing in 1970, offered his view of the Earthly benefits of space investments to Sister Mary Jucunda, a Catholic nun based in Zambia. Sister Mary had written NASA asking why so much money was being spent on space when it could better be used, in her view, to address Earthly problems—a commonplace question in the Apollo period. Stuhlinger touched on the economic benefits of space-related investments, but interestingly, his letter to Sister Mary focused more on the opportunities created by humanity’s move into space that he believed would extend human knowledge and improve the human condition. Forty-five years later, his words still ring true—perhaps even truer in an era marked by a persistent and insidious anti-science and anti-intellectualism undermining the West. “Besides the need for new technologies, there is a continuing great need for new basic knowledge in the sciences if we wish to improve the conditions of human life on earth. We need more knowledge in physics and chemistry, in biology and physiology, and very particularly in medicine to cope with all these problems which threaten man’s life: hunger, disease, contamination of food and water, pollution of the environment…
“As a stimulant and catalyst for the development of new technologies, and for research in the basic sciences, it (the space program) is unparalleled by any other activity. In this respect, we may even say that the space program is taking over a function which for three or four thousand years has been the sad prerogative of wars,” Stuhlinger said.
He opined that the space age provides people “with the technologies, the challenge, the motivation, and even with the optimism to attack these tasks with confidence.” He was right that the act of rolling back ignorance has inherent benefits—a stark contrast to some modern American politicians who positively revel in ignorance.
Stuhlinger wrote in a unique time, but not a singular one. It’s important to remember that people living in the time of Apollo might also have lived during the Wright brothers’ flight, a mere 60 years earlier. Kitty Hawk to the Sea of Tranquility in one human lifetime. This kind of dizzying technological progress, driven by two world wars and a cold one, can be both disorienting and inspiring. Achieving things that seem wildly ambitious, perhaps even impossible, elicits an overall confidence that perhaps humanity’s eternal suffering at the hands of implacable foes—war, pestilence, famine and the like—may yet be consigned to history if only we put our collective effort to it.
Today, the space age has lost some of the luster it enjoyed during the halcyon days of Apollo, but it still has its moments. In 2014, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft and it’s lander Philae made history with a rendezvous and landing on Comet 67P. Just last year, remarkable images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft inspired the public. In 2012, Mars Curiosity’s harrowing landing on the Red Planet captured the imagination. Europe’s COROT and NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft have both stirred the public mind with discoveries of exoplanets around hundreds of stars, and thousands more candidates waiting to be analyzed. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and later American Scott Kelly and Russia’s Mikhail Kornienko became the closest thing to a post-Apollo space rock stars their tenure on ISS, using social media to give the public a sense of life on the station—Hadfield even produced (with the help of the Canadian Space Agency) his own music video.
The entire space environment, both the political environment on the ground and the physical environment above, has changed dramatically in the last fifty years. The world we live in is simply better in many ways because we have learned to live and work in space. When it comes time to defend our planet—more likely against asteroids, less likely against aliens—our presence in space will be crucial. After all, the dinosaurs failed to invest in a space program, to their detriment.
One thing, however, seems certain: humans have crossed the celestial Rubicon. Barring cataclysm, a collapse of civilization or gross negligence, a comprehensive retreat from space is unlikely. Of the three, negligence seems to pose the greatest threat, fed by a public that understands little about how important space assets are and how difficult and expensive it is to operate safely and effectively in the harsh environment beyond Dr. Kármán’s line.
This was originally posted on Medium on March 9th, 2015. Connect with Mack Bradley on LinkedIn or Twitter for more insights.