The plan was straightforward enough. The Moon landing Apollo 11 mission had just splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, and the future looked bright. Nine more moon trips to the Moon would follow, and astronauts would be planting an American flag in the red martian dirt by the mid-1980s, well on their way toward exploring the solar system.
Of course, things didn’t quite turn out that way, as the Apollo 13 near-disaster scrapped three moon landings and lawmakers saw little need to continue the space escapades after the Soviets had been beaten. But in the heady days of the Space Race, it all seemed like the logical, perhaps even inevitable, progression of a motivated space exploration program.
In the decades that followed, NASA’s ambitions were scaled back, leading to years of Space Shuttle runs to low Earth orbit and the construction of the International Space Station. Grander visions were proposed every few administrations – such as Bush the Elder’s 1989 Space Exploration Initiative – but such proposals never saw the light of day. Post-Apollo NASA established a human presence in space over the long term and led to genuine scientific innovations, but something had been lost, the inspirational power of the manned space flight program seemed to be waning.
In the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and a leading space evangelist, offers a sketch of NASA’s historical arc and argues convincingly for renewed effort in space exploration.
Grand journeys of exploration are capital-intensive endeavors, and Tyson cites just three drivers of such efforts in centuries past: the glorification of a divine being, the search for economic gain, and war. This shortlist sounds about right, though I would argue that science has been (i.e. Captain Cook, Malaspina, or Humboldt) and continues to be (robotic space missions) a factor as well.
The most impressive episode in the history of space exploration – the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union – falls into the “War” category, subset “Cold”, and that modifier is a key distinction. Human activity in space may have had strong militaristic overtones, but not in a particularly direct sense. At its most threatening, a strong space exploration program suggested a pervasive presence and a general show of technological might.
What’s more, as the goals became increasingly ambitious – from an orbiting satellite to a manned spacewalk to a moonshot – they also became less explicitly militaristic. It’s almost as if the two participants in the Space Race suffered a joint mission creep away from war games and toward the curiosity- and science-based exploration of the near Solar System. There was something else at play, something inherently valuable and internationally compelling in the act of space exploration that not only didn’t require the excuse of war, but actually pushed back against it.
Tyson also cites increasingly hostile political divides as a retardant of American space exploration ambitions over the past decade. He traces the rise of partisanship to the post-Columbia reckoning that saw George W. Bush offer his Vision for Space Exploration, a plan that would have reoriented funding from the shuttle to a new launch vehicle capable of moving beyond low Earth orbit. When helping to build a plan for the process, Tyson says that he saw “a partisan bias I had not previously encountered in two decades of exposure to space policy.”
Tyson doesn’t offer an explanation for the heightened rancor, but to me, it’s proof of a key law of politics: partisanship loves a vacuum. If there’s no reason to not argue, people will argue. The nonpartisan support of the 1960s was likely due less to a shared vision for an exploratory venture (indeed, there was significant opposition to Kennedy’s ambitious agenda at the time) and more to the rallying against a common threat. Today, the divergent visions for the American manned space flight program persist, but the unifying enemy is absent.
So how might a manned space flight renaissance happen? What would it take for a bold proposal to make it through successive administrations and actually be enacted?
The most likely path appears to be a response to the perceived threat of continued Chinese advancement in space. Like the existential threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the rise of China resonates with America’s own concerns of decline and offers a yardstick by which to chart our progress. But the way to make spaceflight sustainable and independent from the need for provocation by a rival nation is to appeal to that nebulous allure that moved things off the militaristic track in the 1960s.
What is this special ingredient, the je ne sais quoi that encourages people to push the boundaries and explore new places even when other items are on the agenda? Instinct? Curiosity? Self-actualization? It may be hard to put your finger on, but it’s undeniably there, and it’s the key to rebooting manned spaceflight.Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.