WHY SHOULD MAN GO TO THE MOON?
FOR President John F. Kennedy, the U.S. reach for the moon was nothing less than "the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked." Last week, with the tragedy at Cape Kennedy's Pad 34, the nation realized for the first time, in astronautic and human terms, just how hazardous the lunar adventure can be. Old arguments that questioned the whole concept of the Apollo mission seemed to take on new pertinence. Critics were once again asking: Is it worth the cost--in lives, in resources, in money?
By any reckoning, the cost is already extremely high: since 1961, $23 billion has been expended on the man-in-space project alone, which amounts to 65-70% of the entire U.S. space budget. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) presently involves 400,000 workers, including 60,000 scientists and engineers. From the Cape's launching pads to Australian tracking stations, $3.6 billions worth of installations are spotted around the globe.
As missions grow more ambitious and more complex, the price tag will rise. And so, inevitably, will the cost in human life. Grissom, White and Chaffee will certainly not prove to be the last casualties. But the astronauts themselves have always been among the first to argue that though the risks are high, the value of space conquest is incalculably greater. The possibilities and rewards that wait for man on the infinite frontiers of space are limited only by the human imagination.
Still, the questions persist. There are those who deride the reach for the moon as a mere race with the Russians for national prestige. But the competition has shifted in emphasis in the 51 years since the Apollo program began. At the start, speed was all-important. The Russians were already boasting to wavering nations that their space firsts demonstrated the superiority of the Communist way of life. And there was little doubt of the impact of their argument. Everywhere, everyone capable of understanding the significance of the Russian achievement recognized the impressive technological, industrial and scientific skills that lay behind it. Intuitively, people sensed the national purpose that produced the Russian program. Physicist Edward Teller used a sure, fund-winning tactic when he testified before a Senate committee in favor of the Apollo project. "What do you expect to find on the moon?" he was asked. His answer: "The Russians."
The catch-up effort soon became competition on more or less even terms. Diplomats from neutral nations claim that it will not matter much to them which country gets there first, since the other will probably be close behind. But of course it will matter--though not militarily. The moon, once thought of as invincible "high ground" from which to launch an attack on an earthly enemy, now seems beyond consideration as a rocket base. Any lunar-launched missile would take far longer (16 hours) to reach its target than its earth-based counterpart. It would be harder to guide, easier to detect, and simpler to destroy. Which is one big reason behind Russia's willingness to sign an outer-space treaty, renouncing territorial rights or bases on the moon.
Space & Slums
If no military issue is at stake, then why not cooperate with the Russians in space, avoiding expensive duplication of effort? Many Americans would probably favor this--in the highly unlikely event that the Russians ever agreed. But the duplication involved in competition is not all wasted. "In the past," says A. Edward Tyler, author of The Space Around Us, "war has been the great competition. It has made heroes out of individuals and even out of whole nations. Certainly the race for space is a better competition than war." In other words, the race may well become William James's "moral equivalent of war." Quite apart from such hopes, "the U.S. has no choice," says France's Fernand Vinsonneau, secretary general of Eurospace, a group of companies joined to promote space research. "If you give up this race, you simply resign your place as the world's leading technologists."
There are men of good will who remain unconvinced. Moon money, they say, would be far better spent on earth--in the war against poverty, for example, or in much needed medical research. Dr. Warren Weaver, former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has calculated that the probable cost of the lunar project could provide, among other things, 10% annual salary raises for ten years to every teacher in the country, a $10 million grant to each of 200 small U.S. colleges, the endowment of universities in more than 50 new nations. New York's Mayor John Lindsay pleaded for more money for U.S. cities by saying: "I would not want the U.S. to be described by future generations as a society that stood amidst the filth, the oppression and the violence of its slums and shot rockets to the moon." Even Vice President Humphrey, himself a strong promoter of the Apollo program, has worried lest "we go down in history as a people who could send a man to the moon and five Coke vending machines along with him, but could not put man on his feet right here on earth."
To Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., such arguments are anything but new. He can imagine similar criticism in Spain in the 1490s: "Why in hell are Ferdinand and Isabella giving all that money to that madman Columbus when they could build a good nunnery or a hostel or something?" The present answer to that question is a matter of hard political reality--which is another way of saying, national will. Space has seized the nation's imagination; other causes so far, have not. Dollars not saved in space would not automatically be allocated to poverty, or cities, or air-pollution control.
Poverty & Jealousies
Besides, every dollar spent on the lunar program is spent on earth, not on the moon. The money goes into buildings, employee payrolls, training programs. It has become a vital part of the national economy. No project in years has contributed so heavily to so many areas of the country. By its very expenditures, the space effort has effectively helped to reduce poverty.
Faced with the suggestion that their work is far too costly, spacemen are quick to point out that in any event, lunar funds are only a small portion of the national budget; they are not taken out of money meant for medical research or antipoverty drives. The truth is that, for all the intricate problems that must be met before man gets to the moon, planning the trip is far easier than organizing to fight poverty. For space, scientists can draw up a logical program; they have clear goals, few variants. It is lack of technique, not lack of money, that is stalling the Great Society.
And if the space program has contributed mightily to the U.S. economy, it has done even more for U.S. technology. Abruptly and dramatically, it galvanized U.S. science and engineering in a mobilization of manpower and brains unparalleled even by the Manhattan Project of World War II. The U.S. space effort is the pacesetter of our total technological advance. As such it is worth the $7 billion it will cost this year. Says Senator Mike Monroney: "Starving technology mortgages the future of our society. Twenty years ago, Britain picked immediate social goals over technological progress. Today it is paying the price, lacking the production base to support either social or technical progress."
Within the scientific community itself, few dispute the imperative to explore space. But there are some scientists who are frankly jealous of the money that space commands. Nuclear Physicist Ralph Lapp contrasts the $1.3 billion NASA has spent on lunar and planetary science with the modest $76 million the National Science Foundation has to distribute among 5,000 scientists in such fields as astronomy, earth science, oceanography and physics. He quotes one geophysicist: "Sheer lunacy! We are spending more on Mars than we are on studying the earth." Columbia's Professor I. I. Rabi, a Nobel prizewinning physicist who is in favor of the moon program, points out that Congress recently made a sharp cut in appropriations for a new nuclear accelerator and for the cosmotron at Brookhaven, But it refused to slice into space allocations. "Disgraceful," says Rabi.
Curious Circumstance
What bothers most such critics is the cost of making spaceships and space travel suitable for man. Unmanned probes, so the argument runs, would learn far more at much lower expense. Says Caltech's Astrophysicist Jesse Greenstein: "The manned-space program is mainly engineering, concerned with keeping people alive in curious circumstances. This does not advance science very much." Men who feel the same way have insisted for years that manned-space probes cost literally 100 times as much as unmanned, and are not worth it. Says Britain's eminent Astronomer Fred Hoyle: "What has been accomplished is not worth a thousandth part of what has been spent."
But the spacemen themselves file a strong demurrer. To them, the commitment of man to the moon is essential. Says Chris Kraft, director of NASA Flight Operations: "After the canned man and the monkey flights, we found that by adding a man, you've added a tremendous tool. We now have man in the loop--and that's made the difference." Without a man on board a spacecraft, there is no judgment aloft, no freedom of choice, no chance to take advantage of unforeseen opportunities, less chance than ever of getting past unforeseen trouble. Ranger's pictures of the moon, spectacular though they were, contain only 500,000 "bits" of information; the human eye with one glance takes in 100 million "bits." In short, however intricately engineered, no instrument, no computer can quite replace man. As one scientist observed, "You can study a girl's measurements, but it will never be a substitute for putting your arm around her."
Getting man into orbit has already repaid the effort many times. The monitoring devices needed to keep track of astronauts' physical condition have now been adapted for U.S. hospitals, enabling a single nurse to keep track of the condition of many patients perhaps half a mile of corridors away. Today, as a result of space advances, cardiac patients may wear internally implanted electronic pacemakers. Doctors are talking confidently of birth control without pills or intrauterine devices as they experiment with a space-perfected system for monitoring bodily temperature. Refined by aerospace engineers, lasers are finding more and more uses in surgery. Indeed, a whole new breed of medical man has emerged--the biomedical engineer, whose bag contains neither pills nor stethoscope, but electronic black boxes. With his help, aerospace contractors are turning out a remarkable array of prosthetic devices and diagnostic equipment.
And medicine is only the beginning. Heat-resistant shields, developed to protect spacecraft plunging back into the earth's atmosphere, have led to the production of Pyroceram dishes that can go from the housewife's freezer to oven without cracking. The increasing complexity of astronavigation has fostered the development of swifter and smaller computers that find no end of applications on earth. The fuel cell used to supply electric power for Gemini spacecraft is being developed for commercial use, and its production of electricity from oxygen and hydrogen without burning hydrocarbons may be one answer to the smog problem that is increasing all over the world. Some scientists are already speculating about giant orbiting mirrors to light up a battlefield in Viet Nam or melt icebergs, free ice-locked harbors and shift storms from their natural courses. Weather control, to hear them tell it, is almost at hand.
Today it costs about $1,000 a pound to send a payload into space; in ten years, the price is expected to drop to $1 a pound. And when that time comes, engineers should be ready with preprogrammed manufacturing processes that will require the vacuum and weightlessness of space. Joining some of the newer, tougher metals, for example, is a devilishly difficult problem on earth. In orbit, outside any artificial atmosphere, some of them need only be touched together to make a perfect weld.
Even more important than such engineering fallout are some of the almost certain scientific gains. One astronomer with a telescope on the moon, free from the wavering earthly haze, should be able to learn more about the universe in one year than his colleagues have learned in all the previous history of astronomy. Close-up lunar examination should help to answer basic questions about the origins of galaxies and the possibility of life elsewhere in the solar system.
By the enormous effort of mobilizing for an immensely complicated task in a relatively short period, the moon program has also pointed the way to valuable improvements in the new "multidisciplinary approach" to problem solving. Biologists learn to work with physicists, chemists with mathematicians, astronomers with geologists. The approach is now being applied to many of the longstanding problems of society: the population explosion, crime, transportation, nutrition and health, communications.
Studying the problem of maintaining an astronaut in space has forced earthbound scientists to realize that the earth too is a closed system; the pollution of its air and its streams is the same problem that the astronaut's closed capsule presents in miniature.
Out of the Valley
In sum, there should be little serious doubt that the space effort has proved its worth many times over. Three months from now, the American Astronautical Society will meet in Dallas to discuss the commercial utilization of space, from television, navigation aids and weather satellites to tourism. Tourism? Well, Barren Hilton, president of the Hilton Hotels Corp., will speak on the "Hilton Orbiter Hotel."
That may be a joke for some decades to come, but other projects are not. Next fall, a special U.N. space meeting will be held in Vienna to discuss the advantages to be derived from the U.S.'s and Russia's orbiting weather and communications satellites, and to consider the greater participation of other nations in space. To utilize the "after-Apollo" capability of the Saturn rockets, IBM has already proposed a series of manned orbiting labs, each of which would be manned by rotating crews of up to a dozen men. These could observe weather, chart mineral deposits, track fish and ocean currents. Their work, IBM calculates, would save about $100 billion annually.
The moon itself may not be a particularly valuable piece of real estate. But neither is a flight to the moon an end in itself; the moon is no more than a way station on a route that scientists have only begun to map. And there is no doubt that man is going to make the trip some day. Many moon enthusiasts argue that for the U.S. not to reach for the moon would leave all Americans like a tribe that always stays in its valley and never crosses the mountain.
Says Princeton's Professor John Wheeler: "Space is the modern equivalent of the American frontier. If we didn't go to the moon, we would be lesser people. I have a feeling that instead of doing more on domestic programs, we would do less." Even Dr. James Killian Jr., now Chairman of the Corporation, M.I.T., who publicly questioned the commitment of so much manpower to the moon project three years ago, today concedes: "Space exploration is one of man's great adventures, and the U.S. must participate with brilliance and boldness."
The moon is a challenge that the U.S. has already taken, a milestone that U.S. astronauts are already looking beyond. For the Apollo program is only a small part of the space effort. The real object is for the U.S. to develop the capability of voyaging confidently to the limits of man's imagination and ingenuity. The value of such voyages will always be unpredictable. But the history of the human race, said famed Norwegian Explorer Fridtjof Nansen, "is a continual struggle from darkness toward light. It is therefore to no purpose to discuss the uses of knowledge; man wants to know, and when he ceases to do so, he is no longer man."
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