space exploration

The Hubble Space Telescope, the most productive scientific instrument of all time, is slated for its fifth and final repair mission later this year. The space shuttle astronauts will launch from Kennedy Space Center, Fla., match orbits with the telescope, capture it, service it, upgrade it, and replace its broken parts—on the spot.

Roughly the size of a Greyhound bus, Hubble was launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1990 and already has outlived its 15-year life expectancy. Students in high school today have never known a time without Hubble as their conduit to the cosmos. This new servicing mission will extend Hubble's life several more years. It also will replace burned-out circuit boards to the Advanced Camera for Surveys. That's the instrument responsible for Hubble's most memorable images since it was installed in 2002.

Servicing Hubble is a task that requires exquisite dexterity. Filmed as part of a PBS NOVA segment on the Hubble repair mission, I recently had the opportunity to visit NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. There, I donned puffy, pressurized astronaut gloves, wielded a space-age portable screwdriver, stuck my head in a space helmet, and attempted to extract a faulty circuit board in a model of the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which was embedded within a full-scale mockup of the Hubble Telescope. This was a darn-near impossible feat. And I wasn't weightless. I was not wearing the full-body spacesuit. Nor were Earth and space drifting by.

We normally think of astronauts as brave and noble. But, in this case, having the right stuff includes being a hardware surgeon extraordinaire.

Perhaps you didn't know, but Hubble is not alone up there. About two dozen space telescopes of assorted sizes and shapes orbit Earth and the Moon. Each of them provides a clear view of the cosmos that is unobstructed, unblemished, and undiminished by Earth's turbulent and murky atmosphere. But most of these telescopes were launched with no means of servicing them. Parts wear out. Gyroscopes fail. Batteries die. These hardware realities limit a telescope's life expectancy to anywhere from three to seven years.

These telescopes all advance science, but most perform their duties without the public's awareness or adulation. They are designed to detect bands of light invisible to the human eye, some of which never penetrate Earth's atmosphere. Entire classes of objects and phenomena in the cosmos reveal themselves only through one or more of these invisible cosmic windows. Black holes, for example, were discovered by their X-ray calling card—radiation that was generated by the surrounding, swirling gas just before it descended into the abyss. Telescopes also have captured microwave radiation—the primary physical evidence for the Big Bang.

Hubble, on the other hand, is the first and only space telescope to observe the universe using primarily visible light. Its stunningly crisp, colorful, and detailed images of the cosmos make Hubble a kind of supreme version of human eyes in space. Yet Hubble's appeal to us comes from much more than parades of pretty portraits. Hubble came of age in the 1990s, during an exponential growth of access to the Internet. That's when its digital images were first cast into the public domain. As we all know, anything that's fun, free, and forwardable spreads rapidly online. Hubble images, one more splendorous than the next, became screen savers and desktop wallpaper for computers owned by people who never before would have had the occasion to celebrate, however quietly, our place in the universe.

Indeed, Hubble brought the universe into our backyard. Or, rather, it expanded our backyards to enclose the universe itself. It did that with images so intellectually, visually, and even spiritually fulfilling that most don't even need captions. No matter what Hubble reveals—planets, dense star fields, colorful interstellar nebulae, deadly black holes, graceful colliding galaxies, the large-scale structure of the universe—each image establishes your own private vista on the cosmos.

Hubble's scientific legacy is unimpeachable. More research papers have been published using its data than have ever been published for any other scientific instrument in any discipline. Among Hubble's highlights is settling the decades-old debate about the age of the universe. Previously, the data were so bad that astrophysicists could not agree. Some thought 10 billion years. Others, 20 billion. Yes, it was embarrassing. But Hubble enabled us to measure accurately how the brightness varies in a particular type of star that resides in a distant cluster of galaxies. That information, when plugged into a simple formula, tells us their distance from Earth. And because the entire universe is expanding at a known rate, we can then turn back the clock to determine how long ago everything was in the same place. The answer? The universe was born 14 billion years ago.

Another result, long suspected to be true but confirmed by Hubble, was the discovery that every large galaxy, such as our own Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole in its center that dines on stars, gas clouds, and other unsuspecting matter that wanders too close. The centers of galaxies are so densely packed with stars that Earth-based telescopes see only a mottled cloud of light—the merged image of hundreds or thousands of stars. From space, Hubble's sharp imagery allows us to see each star individually and to track its motion around the galactic center. Behold, these stars move much, much faster than they have any right to. A small, unseen yet powerful source of gravity must be tugging on them. Crank the equations, and we are forced to conclude that a black hole lurks in their midst.

In 2005, the Bush Administration announced that Hubble would not receive the needed funds for this last servicing mission. Curiously, the loudest voices of dissent were not from the scientists but from the general public. Akin to a modern version of a torch-wielding mob, angry editorials, snippy letters to the editor, and no end of radio and television talk shows all urged NASA to restore the funding and keep Hubble alive. Congress ultimately listened and reversed NASA's decision. Democracy had a shining moment: Hubble would indeed be serviced, one last time. For the first time in the history of civilization, the public took ownership of a scientific instrument—they took ownership of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Of course, nothing lasts forever—except, perhaps, the universe itself. So Hubble eventually will die. But in the meantime, NASA is building the James Webb Space Telescope, specially designed to see deeper into the universe than Hubble ever could. When launched early next decade, it will allow us to plumb the depths of gas clouds in our own Milky Way galaxy in search of stellar nurseries, as well as probe the earliest epochs of the universe in search of the formation of galaxies themselves.

Meanwhile, NASA plans to retire the aging space shuttle by 2010. This step will enable its aerospace engineers, assembly lines, and funding streams to focus on a new suite of launch vehicles that will do what the shuttles are not designed to do—return us to the Moon and take us on to Mars and beyond.

The march of discovery continues, driven by our timeless and collective urge to explore.

For millennia, people have looked up to the night sky and wondered about our place in the universe. But not until the 17th century was any serious thought given to the prospect of traveling there. One English science buff, John Wilkins, speculated in 1638 that the moon would be habitable one day and imagined a flying chariot in which a man may sit.

Three hundred thirty-one years later, humans did indeed land on the moon, aboard a chariot called Apollo 11, as part of an ambitious investment in science and technology conducted by a relatively young country called the United States of America. That enterprise drove a half-century of unprecedented wealth and prosperity that today we take for granted. Now, as our interest in science wanes, America is poised to fall behind the rest of the industrialized world in every measure of technological proficiency.

For the last 30 years, more and more students in America's science and engineering graduate schools have been foreign-born. They would come to the U.S., earn their degrees and stay, directly entering the high-tech workforce. Today, with emerging economic opportunities back in India, China and Eastern Europe, many graduates simply return home.

Science and technology are the greatest engines of economic growth the world has ever seen. Without regenerating homegrown interest in these fields, the comfortable lifestyle to which Americans have become accustomed will draw to a rapid close.

Though recent stories about China have focused on concerns such as tainted drugs and food, China's growth as a major world player demands our attention. During a recent trip to Beijing, I expected to see wide boulevards dense with bicycles as a primary means of transportation. Instead, I was surprised to see those boulevards filled with top-end luxury cars, while cranes knit a new skyline of high-rise buildings. The controversial Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, the largest engineering project in the world, is six times the size of the Hoover Dam. And China also is building the world's largest airport.

In October 2003, China became the third space-faring nation (after the U.S. and Russia) as it launched its first Taikonaut into orbit. Next step, the moon. Meanwhile, Europe and India are redoubling their efforts to conduct robotic science on spaceborne platforms. There's also a growing interest in space exploration from a dozen other countries around the world, including Kenya, whose equatorial location on the east coast of Africa makes it geographically ideal for space launches—even better than Cape Canaveral is for the U.S. This emerging community of nations is hungry for their slice of the aerospace universe. In America, contrary to our self-image, we are no longer leaders but simply players. We've moved backward just by standing still.

But there remains hope for us. You can learn something deep about a nation when you look at what it accomplishes as a culture. Do you know the most popular museum in the world over the past decade? It's not the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Uffizi in Florence or the Louvre in Paris. At a running average of nearly 9 million visitors per year, it's the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., which contains everything from the Wright Brothers' original 1903 airplane to the Apollo 11 command module. Visitors value the air and space artifacts this museum contains. Why? It's an American legacy to the world. But, more important, it represents the urge to dream and the will to enable it. These traits are fundamental to being human and have coincided with what it is to be American.

When you go to countries without such ambitions working within their culture, you feel the absence of hope. Due to all manner of politics, economics and geography, people are reduced to worrying only about that day's shelter or the next day's meal. It's a shame, even a tragedy, how many people don't get to think about the future. Technology coupled with wise leadership not only solves these problems but also enables dreams of tomorrow.

You know you're in America when every generation believes it's going to live differently from the previous one. Americans have come to expect something new in their lives with every passing moment—something to look forward to that will make life a little more fun to live and a little more enlightening to behold. Exploration accomplishes this naturally.

The greatest explorer today is not even human. It's the Hubble Space Telescope, which for nearly two decades has offered us all a mind-expanding window to the cosmos. But when the Hubble was launched in 1990, a blunder in the design of its optics generated hopelessly blurred images. Corrective optics were installed during the telescope's first servicing mission in 1993, which enabled the sharp images that we now take for granted. But for three years the images were simply fuzzy. What to do? We kept taking data, hoping some useful science would nonetheless come of it. Eager astrophysicists at Baltimore's Space Telescope Science Institute, the research headquarters for the Hubble, wrote suites of advanced image-processing software to help identify and isolate stars in otherwise crowded, unfocused fields. These novel techniques allowed some science to get done while the repair mission was planned.

Meanwhile, medical researchers at the Lombardi Cancer Research Center at the Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., recognized that the challenge faced by astrophysicists was similar to that faced by doctors in their visual search for tumors in mammograms. Using funds granted by the National Science Foundation, the medical community adopted the new techniques being used for the Hubble to assist their early detection of breast cancer. Countless women are alive today because of ideas stimulated by a design flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.

You cannot script these kinds of outcomes, yet they occur daily. The cross-pollination of disciplines almost always creates innovation and discovery. And nothing accomplishes this like space exploration, which draws from the ranks of astrophysicists, biologists, physiologists, chemists, engineers and planetary geologists. Their collective efforts have the capacity to improve and enhance all that we have come to value as a modern society.

How many times have we heard the mantra: Why are we spending billions of dollars up there in space when we have pressing problems down here on Earth? Let's re-ask the question in an illuminating way: What is the total cost in taxes of all spaceborne telescopes, planetary probes, the rovers on Mars, the space station and shuttle, telescopes yet to orbit and missions yet to fly? Answer: less than 1% on the tax dollar—7/10ths of a penny, to be exact. I'd prefer that it were more, perhaps 2 cents on the dollar. Even during the storied Apollo era, peak NASA spending amounted to no more than 4 cents on the tax dollar. At that level, NASA’s current space-exploration program would reclaim our pre-eminence in a field we pioneered. Right now, the program paddles along slowly, with barely enough support to ever lead the journey.

So, with 99 out of 100 cents going to fund the rest of our nation's priorities, the space program is not now (nor has it ever really been) in anybody's way. Instead, America's former investments in aerospace have shaped our discovery-infused culture in ways that are obvious to the rest of the world. But we are a sufficiently wealthy nation to embrace this investment for tomorrow—to drive our economy, our ambitions and, above all, our dreams.

Human ingenuity seldom fails to improve on the fruits of human invention. Whatever may have dazzled everyone on its debut is almost guaranteed to be superseded and, someday, to look quaint.

In 2000 B.C. a pair of ice skates made of polished animal bone and leather thongs was a transportation breakthrough. In 1610 Galileo's eight-power telescope was an astonishing tool of detection, capable of giving the senators of Venice a sneak peek at hostile ships before they could enter the lagoon. In 1887 the one-horsepower Benz Patent Motorwagen was the first commercially produced car powered by an internal combustion engine. In 1946 the thirty-ton, showroom-size ENIAC, with its 18,000 vacuum tubes and 6,000 manual switches, pioneered electronic computing. Today you can glide across roadways on in-line skates, gaze at images of faraway galaxies brought to you by the Hubble Space Telescope, cruise the autobahn in a 600-horsepower roadster, and carry your three-pound laptop to an outdoor cafe.

Of course, such advances don't just fall from the sky. Clever people think them up. Problem is, to turn a clever idea into reality, somebody has to write the check. And when market forces shift, those somebodies may lose interest and the checks may stop coming. If computer companies had stopped innovating in 1978, your desk might still sport a hundred-pound IBM 5110. If communications companies had stopped innovating in 1973, you might still be schlepping a two-pound, nine-inch-long cell phone. And if in 1968 the U.S. space industry had stopped developing bigger and better rockets to launch humans beyond the Moon, we'd never have surpassed the Saturn V rocket.

Oops!

Sorry about that. We haven't surpassed the Saturn V. The largest, most powerful rocket ever flown by anybody, ever, the thirty-six-story-tall Saturn V was the first and only rocket to launch people from Earth to someplace else in the universe. It enabled every Apollo mission to the Moon from 1969 through 1972, as well as the 1973 launch of Skylab 1, the first U.S. space station.

Inspired in part by the successes of the Saturn V and the momentum of the Apollo program, visionaries of the day foretold a future that never came to be: space habitats, Moon bases, and Mars colonies up and running by the 1990s. But funding for the Saturn V evaporated as the Moon missions wound down. Additional production runs were canceled, the manufacturers' specialized machine tools were destroyed, and skilled personnel had to find work on other projects. Today U.S. engineers can't even build a Saturn V clone.

What cultural forces froze the Saturn V rocket in time and space? What misconceptions led to the gap between expectation and reality?

Soothsaying tends to come in two flavors: doubt and delirium. It was doubt that led skeptics to declare that the atom would never be split, the sound barrier would never be broken, and people would never want or need computers in their homes. But in the case of the Saturn V rocket, it was delirium that misled futurists into assuming the Saturn V was an auspicious beginning—never considering that it could, instead, be an end.

On December 30, 1900, for its last Sunday paper of the nineteenth century, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle published a sixteen-page supplement headlined THINGS WILL BE SO DIFFERENT A HUNDRED YEARS HENCE. The contributors—business leaders, military men, pastors, politicians, and experts of every persuasion—imagined what housework, poverty, religion, sanitation, and war would be like in the year 2000. They enthused about the potential of electricity and the automobile. There was even a map of the world-to-be, showing an American Federation comprising most of the Western Hemisphere from the lands above the Arctic Circle down to the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego—plus sub-Saharan Africa, the southern half of Australia, and all of New Zealand.

Most of the writers portrayed an expansive future. But not George H. Daniels, a man of authority at the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, who peered into his crystal ball and boneheadedly predicted:

It is scarcely possible that the twentieth century will witness improvements in transportation that will be as great as were those of the nineteenth century.

Elsewhere in his article, Daniels envisioned affordable global tourism and the diffusion of white bread to China and Japan. Yet he simply couldn't imagine what might replace steam as the power source for ground transportation, let alone a vehicle moving through the air. Even though he stood on the doorstep of the twentieth century, this manager of the world's biggest railroad system could not see beyond the automobile, the locomotive, and the steamship.

Three years later, almost to the day, Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first-ever series of powered, controlled, heavier-than-air flights. By 1957 the U.S.S.R. launched the first satellite into Earth orbit. And in 1969 two Americans became the first human beings to walk on the Moon.

Daniels is hardly the only person to have misread the technological future. Even experts who aren't totally deluded can have tunnel vision. On page 13 of the Eagle's Sunday supplement, the principal examiner at the U.S. Patent Office, W. W. Townsend, wrote, The automobile may be the vehicle of the decade, but the air ship is the conveyance of the century. Sounds visionary, until you read further. What he was talking about were blimps and zeppelins. Both Daniels and Townsend, otherwise well-informed citizens of a changing world, were clueless about what tomorrow's technology would bring.

Even the Wrights were guilty of doubt about the future of aviation. In 1901, discouraged by a summer's worth of unsuccessful tests with a glider, Wilbur told Orville it would take another fifty years for someone to fly. Nope: the birth of aviation was just two years away. On the windy, chilly morning of December 17, 1903, starting from a North Carolina sand dune called Kill Devil Hill, Orville was the first to fly the brothers' 600-pound plane through the air. His epochal journey lasted twelve seconds and covered 120 feet—a distance just shy of the wingspan of a Boeing 757.

Judging by what the mathematician, astronomer, and Royal Society gold medalist Simon Newcomb had published just two months earlier, the flights from Kill Devil Hill should never have taken place when they did:

Quite likely the twentieth century is destined to see the natural forces which will enable us to fly from continent to continent with a speed far exceeding that of the bird.

But when we inquire whether aerial flight is possible in the present state of our knowledge; whether, with such materials as we possess, a combination of steel, cloth and wire can be made which, moved by the power of electricity or steam, shall form a successful flying machine, the outlook may be altogether different.

Some representatives of informed public opinion went even further. The New York Times was steeped in doubt just one week before the Wright brothers went aloft in the original Wright Flyer. Writing on December 10, 1903—not about the Wrights but about their illustrious and publicly funded competitor, Samuel P. Langley, an astronomer, physicist, and chief administrator of the Smithsonian Institution—the Times declared:

We hope that Professor Langley will not put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time, and the money involved, in further airship experiments. Life is short, and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can be expected to result from trying to fly.

You might think attitudes would have changed as soon as people from several countries had made their first flights. But no. Wilbur Wright wrote in 1909 that no flying machine would ever make the journey from New York to Paris. Richard Burdon Haldane, the British secretary of war, told Parliament in 1909 that even though the airplane might one day be capable of great things, from the war point of view, it is not so at present. Ferdinand Foch, a highly regarded French military strategist and the supreme commander of the Allied forces near the end of the First World War, opined in 1911 that airplanes were interesting toys but had no military value. Late that same year, near Tripoli, an Italian plane became the first to drop a bomb.

Early attitudes about flight beyond Earth's atmosphere followed a similar trajectory. True, plenty of philosophers, scientists, and sci-fi writers had thought long and hard about outer space. The sixteenth-century philosopher-friar Giordano Bruno proposed that intelligent beings in habited an infinitude of worlds. The seventeenth-century soldier-writer Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac portrayed the Moon as a world with forests, violets, and people.

But those writings were fantasies, not blueprints for action. By the early twentieth century, electricity, telephones, automobiles, radios, airplanes, and countless other engineering marvels were all becoming basic features of modern life. So couldn't earthlings build machines capable of space travel? Many people who should have known better said it couldn't be done, even after the successful 1942 test launch of the world's first long-range ballistic missile: Germany's deadly V-2 rocket. Capable of punching through Earth's atmosphere, it was a crucial step toward reaching the Moon.

Richard van der Riet Woolley, the eleventh British Astronomer Royal, is the source of a particularly woolly remark. When he landed in London after a thirty-six-hour flight from Australia, some reporters asked him about space travel. It's utter bilge, he answered. That was in early 1956. In early 1957 Lee De Forest, a prolific American inventor who helped birth the age of electronics, declared, Man will never reach the moon, regardless of all future scientific advances. Remember what happened in late 1957? Not just one but two Soviet Sputniks entered Earth orbit. The space race had begun.

Whenever someone says an idea is bilge (which, I suppose, is British for baloney), you must first ask whether it violates any well-tested laws of physics. If so, the idea is likely to be bilge. If not, the only challenge is to find a clever engineer—and, of course, a committed source of funding.

The day the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, a chapter of science fiction became science fact, and the future became the present. All of a sudden, futurists went overboard with their enthusiasm. The delerium that technology would advance at lightning speed replaced the delusion that it would barely advance at all. Experts went from having much too little confidence in the pace of technology to having much too much. And the guiltiest people of all were the space enthusiasts.

Commentators became fond of twenty-year intervals, within which some previously inconceivable goal would supposedly be accomplished. On January 6, 1967, in a front-page story, The Wall Street Journal announced: The most ambitious U.S. space endeavor in the years ahead will be the campaign to land men on neighboring Mars. Most experts estimate the task can be accomplished by 1985. The very next month, in its debut issue, The Futurist magazine announced that according to long-range forecasts by the RAND Corporation, a pioneer think-tank, there was a 60 percent probability that a manned lunar base would exist by 1986. In The Book of Predictions, published in 1980, the rocket pioneer Robert C. Truax forecast that 50,000 people would be living and working in space by the year 2000. When that benchmark year arrived, people were indeed living and working in space. But the tally was not 50,000. It was three. The first crew of the International Space Station.

All those visionaries (and countless others) never really grasped the forces that drive technological progress. In Wilbur and Orville's day, you could tinker your way into major engineering advances. Their first airplane did not require a grant from the National Science Foundation: they funded it through their bicycle business. The brothers constructed the wings and fuselage themselves, with tools they already owned, and got their resourceful bicycle mechanic, Charles E. Taylor, to design and hand-build the engine. The operation was basically two guys and a garage.

Space exploration unfolds on an entirely different scale. The first moonwalkers were two guys, too—Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin—but behind them loomed the force of a mandate from an assassinated president, 10,000 engineers, $100 billion, and a Saturn V rocket.

Notwithstanding the sanitized memories so many of us have of the Apollo era, Americans were not first on the Moon because we're explorers by nature or because our country is committed to the pursuit of knowledge. We got to the Moon first because the United States was out to beat the Soviet Union, to win the Cold War any way we could. John F. Kennedy made that clear when he complained to top NASA officials in November 1962:

I'm not that interested in space. I think it's good, I think we ought to know about it, we're ready to spend reasonable amounts of money. But we're talking about these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs and the only justification for it in my opinion to do it in this time or fashion is because we hope to beat them [the Soviet Union] and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.

Like it or not, war (cold or hot) is the most powerful funding driver in the public arsenal. When a country wages war, money flows like floodwaters. Lofty goals—such as curiosity, discovery, exploration, and science—can get you money for modest-size projects, provided they resonate with the political and cultural views of the moment. But big, expensive activities are inherently long term, and require sustained investment that must survive economic fluctuations and changes in the political winds.

In all eras, across time and culture, only three drivers have fulfilled that funding requirement: war, greed, and the celebration of royal or religious power. The Great Wall of China; the pyramids of Egypt; the Gothic cathedrals of Europe; the U.S. interstate highway system; the voyages of Columbus and Cook—nearly every major undertaking owes its existence to one or more of those three drivers. Today, as the power of kings is supplanted by elected governments, and the power of religion is often expressed in non-architectural undertakings, that third driver has lost much of its sway, leaving war and greed to run the show. Sometimes those two drivers work hand in hand, as in the art of profiteering from the art of war. But war itself remains the ultimate and most compelling rationale.

Having been born the same week NASA was founded, I was eleven years old during the voyage of Apollo 11, and had already identified the universe as my life's passion. Unlike so many other people who watched Neil Armstrong's first steps on the Moon, I wasn't jubilant. I was simply relieved that someone was finally exploring another world. To me, Apollo 11 was clearly the beginning of an era.

But I, too, was delirious. The lunar landings continued for three and a half years. Then they stopped. The Apollo program became the end of an era, not the beginning. And as the Moon voyages receded in time and memory, they seemed ever more unreal in the history of human projects.

Unlike the first ice skates or the first airplane or the first desktop computer—artifacts that make us all chuckle when we see them today—the first rocket to the Moon, the 364-foot-tall Saturn V, elicits awe, even reverence. Three Saturn V relics lie in state at the Johnson Space Center in Texas, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Alabama. Streams of worshippers walk the length of each rocket. They touch the mighty rocket nozzles at the base, like the apes who touched the Monolith in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Oddysey, and wonder how something so large could ever have bested Earth's gravity. To transform their awe into chuckles, our country will have to resume the effort to boldly go where no man has gone before. Only then will the Saturn V look as quaint as every other invention that human ingenuity has paid the compliment of improving upon.