Pale Blue Dot - Carl Sagan [98]
Once upon a time it was thought, on the basis of econometric models, that for every dollar invested in NASA many dollars were pumped into the U.S. economy. If this multiplier effect applied more to NASA than to most government agencies, it would provide a potent fiscal and social justification for the space program. NASA supporters were not shy about appealing to this argument. But a 1994 Congressional Budget Office study found it to be a delusion. While NASA spending benefits some production segments of the U.S. economy—especially the aerospace industry—there is no preferential multiplier effect. Likewise, while NASA spending certainly creates or maintains jobs and profits, it does so no more efficiently than many other government agencies.
Then there’s education, an argument that has proved from time to time very attractive in the White House. Doctorates in science peaked somewhere around the time of Apollo 11, maybe even with the proper phase lag after the start of the Apollo program. The cause-and-effect relationship is perhaps undemonstrated, although not implausible. But so what? If we’re interested in improving education, is going to Mars the best route? Think of what we could do with $100 billion for teacher training and salaries, school laboratories and libraries, scholarships for disadvantaged students, research facilities, and graduate fellowships. Is it really true that the best way to promote science education is to go to Mars?
Another argument is that human missions to Mars will occupy the military-industrial complex, diffusing the temptation to use its considerable political muscle to exaggerate external threats and pump up defense funding. The other side of this particular coin is that by going to Mars we maintain a standby technological capacity that might be important for future military contingencies. Of course, we might simply ask those guys to do something directly useful for the civilian economy. But as we saw in the 1970s with Grumman buses and Boeing/Vertol commuter trains, the aerospace industry experiences real difficulty in producing competitively for the civilian economy. Certainly a tank may travel 1,000 miles a year and a bus 1,000 miles a week, so the basic designs must be different. But on matters of reliability at least, the Defense Department seems to be much less demanding.
Cooperation in space, as I’ve already mentioned, is becoming an instrument of international cooperation—for example, in slowing the proliferation of strategic weapons to new nations. Rockets decommissioned because of the end of the Cold War might be gainfully employed in missions to Earth orbit, the Moon, the planets, asteroids, and comets. But all this can be accomplished without human missions to Mars.
Other justifications are offered. It is argued that the ultimate solution to world energy problems is to strip-mine the Moon, return the solar-wind-implanted helium-3 back to Earth, and use it in fusion reactors. What fusion reactors? Even if this were possible, even if it were cost-effective, it is a technology 50 or 100 years away. Our energy problems need to be solved at a less leisurely pace.
Even stranger is the argument that we have to send human beings into space in order to solve the world population crisis. But some 250,000 more people are born than die every day—which means that we would have to launch 250,000 people per day into space to maintain world population at its present levels. This appears to be beyond our present capability.
I RUN THROUGH such a list and try to add up the pros and cons, bearing in mind the other urgent claims on the federal budget. To me, the argument so far comes down to this question: Can the sum of a large number of individually inadequate justifications add up to an adequate justification?
I don’t think any of the items on my list of purported justifications is demonstrably worth $500 billion or even $100 billion, certainly not in the short term. On the other hand, most