Public reactions to the space program, especially to the 1969 Moon landing are discussed. Space exploration is compared to explorations during the Age of Discovery. It is argued that space exploration has failed to capture the public's imagination, that it has had few economic or social consequences of any importance, and that it has had a minimum impact on national prestige

Mazlish, B.

English

NASA Technical Reports Server

N85-35150 
THE IDEA OF SPACE EXPLORATION 
In the 1950s. man fim ventured into outer space. At the end of the 
1960s. he was on the Moon, having tnvclcd over 200,000 mila and at 
spceds upward of 16.000 miles per hour. The modem Dacdalus had 
taken his fmt step into reality. An age-old dream had been r&ed. A 
proud Wcrnhcr von Bmun compared it to that moment in evolution 
"when aquatic Life came crawbng up on the land. " 
Now we seem to be crawling back. The Moon landing, for all the im- 
pact it had during that sultry July night in 1969. has suttercd into small 
&ccn upon us. Our cxpcaations fulfilled, we now xtm to have lost in- 
terest. I am puzzled by the disparity between the greatness of the deed 
and the meanness of the result. How to explain it? 
To cxplorc further the gap between the deed and i n  mimation. we 
can proceed along two major paths: to comp;uc space with past episodes 
of exploration and develcpment; and to examine the contemporary con- 
text in and of itself. Both, evcn briefly examined, arc revealing. 
In comparing space with past cpisodcs that bea~  a resemblance to it, 
we are engaging in historical analogy. Historical analogy gives flesh to a 
pcrception of vague rcscmblanre. It is not a rigorous form of reasoning, 
but it is one of the more attractive. It is. roo, a fashioner of 
myths-durable ones that survive, like a locust's brittle armor. evcn h e r  
life itself has dcpartcd. Analogy, finally, has but one eye, and it sets only 
similarities. 
The analogy that immediately springs to mind is the Age of 
Discovery. One is struck by the similarities: a desire for national prestige; 
a hope of gain, both economic and milituy; an impulx to adventure; 
sheer curiosity. There also was a religious factor in the 15th century. Even 
that finds a 20th-century expression in our notion of scientific "mission. " 
In the end, however, I do not believe that the analogy of the space 
progrm, emphasizing its exploratory a s p ,  with the Age of Discovtry is 
as useful as some others (e.g., with thc railroad, as I shall attempt to 
show). Wc have inaugurated an age of discovery, but it is not the Age of 
Discovery, and it lacks the props and resonance we wcre conditioned to 
expect. 
The major difference, I believe. is that in space there arc no flora and 
fauna. There are no people on the Moon to be conquered or convened. 
There are no new animais to grace the parks of a Spanish king, no exotic 
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plants to nurture in the royal gardens at Kcw. Columbus returned with 
naked savages. Lewis and Clark identified 24 Indian tribes, 178 plants, 
and 122 animals, 111 of them previously unknown. Even the voyagers of 
the Beagle sailed into port with exotic, if ugly, Fucgians that titillated the 
English public. 
Space, in comparison, is "empty," and our chief harvest thus far has 
been in the form of rocks. The Moon is unpopulated; its "man," visible 
from 200,000 mila away. vanishes on clox approach. The only cvthly 
comparison is the arctic and antarctic, although thcy arc, in fact, more 
richly endowed. and neither of these, for comparable reasons, has ever 
aroused much enthusiasm. Vast, cold worlds, thcy lie largely untapped 
and unsettled. 
How can one bccome enthusiastic about such "inhuman" areas? Ex- 
ploration of such "terrains" cannot give rise to a sense of "climates of 
opinion." which shake the traditional order. It does not leave us with the 
19th century's feeling of being "Between Two Worlds," either in time or 
geography. Where early explorations were preceded by myths about 
gargoy!es blowing off shore, or apes raping women (as Voitaue fondly 
imagined), or even abominable snowmen, the main equivalent titillation 
of the space effort was a scientific surmise about the possibility of some 
kind of extraterrestrial life. In this, we were soon to bc disappointed. 
In such an empty world, devoid of any presence other than one's 
own in a clumsy, bulky spacesuit, myths and imagination crumbled into 
computer bits. The symbolic nature of space dissolved. Physical and 
biological scientists might well be abwrbcd, but what was there to interest 
their social science and humanistic collcagua? Or the general public, for 
whom the iattcr served as interpreters? 
If space and the Moon offered so little of "human interest," what of 
the explorers themselves? They, too, failed to capture our imaginations. 
They were fighter and test p i l~ts  turned astronauts, but not adventurers. 
They were not heroes, in spite of NASA s media hype (and though the 
age was antiheroic, k was ambivalently so). Instead, the astronauts were a 
tcai?, replaceable men, with not a Columbus or even an Amerigo 
Vespucci among them. The Moon landing craft might be called the 
"Eagle." but no Lindbergh, in lone splendor, sat at its controls. The 
argument over manned and unmanned spacecraft was without "human" 
consequence, for the astronauts became replaceable and duplicable in- 
struments just as much as the unmanned vehicles. 
Norman Mailer, in one of the few attempts to respond imaginatively 
to the space effort-one thinks earlier of Camocn's The L u s d ,  or 
Shakespeare's The Tempest-brilliantly attempts in Of a Fire on the 
Moon to kindle sparks of imagination to set aglow our hearts and minds. 
He sp& of dreams that border on either madness or ecstasy, of Hem- 
ingwayaque courage, and dread of death. A11 to almost no avail. NASA. 
in its very concern that an Apolio 11-connected death would result in the 
end of support for space investigation. unknowingly aborted the public's 
kltercst. As Mailer puts it, "The ircny was that the world, fmt sacrifices in 
octer spacc paid, would have begun to watch future flights with pain and 
concern." Death fears and dreams gav: way to a TV picture, whose 
dramatic appeal was almost nil. Tranquillity Bax took on, unintendcdly, 
a soporific quality that spread out over the entire space program. So much 
for the Age of Discovery analogy. 
The other major analogy useful to make is with what clscwhere I 
have called "social inventions." I define it as an invention that is 
technological (e .g., missiles, launching pads), economic (e .g . . involving 
large-scale employment of manpower. widespread use of materials), 
political (e.g., involving new forms of legislation, and new dispositions of 
political forces). sociological (e.g., affecting kinship groups, communities, 
classes), and intellectual (e.g., changing man's v i m  of spacc and time). 
Such an invention has a profound effect on us; it is literally "rcvolu- 
tionary." The lowly cotton industry in the early 19th century and the 
railroad in the mid-19th century. in Britain, were of this nature. Thus, 
the innovations in cotton maxiufacturing had enormous secondary and 
tertiary effects, helping to spark the Industrial Revolution, or what W. W. 
Rostow has called "sustained takeoff ': cotton manufacturing brings into 
being the factory, and its operatives (or proletariat, a new class); groups 
the workers in an increasingly populated urban setting; stimulates the 
growing of cotton and the cotton trade (not to mention r: slave trade); 
and strongly affects the coal and iron industries by its demand. A Man- 
chester, as well as a Mancheser School of Free Trade, symbolizes its im- 
pact. There is no comparable "Manchesrer"-Cape Canaveral will not 
do-in space development. 
The railroad is of a similar magnitude to cotton manufacturing, but 
more analogous to the space program in its use of engines for transporta- 
tion, though without the element of exploration. The railroad, like the 
space program, for a while also annually consumed about 2 YZ percent of 
the GNP as its investment requirement. But think of the railroad's im- 
pact on communities, on social structure, on related tcchnologies, on the 
economy as a whole in comparison to the space program, i.e., its return to 
society! 
And now remember the optimistic predictions. In 1963, Robert 
Jastrow and Hornet E. Newell predicted that the space program would 
mean "the be~kfits of basic research, economically valuable applications 
of satellites, contributions to industrial technolop, a general stimulus to 
education and to the younger generation, and the strengthenir~g of our 
international position by our acceptance of leadership in a historic enter- 
prise." Erik Bergaust exalted: "Fifty years from now? Who knows, 
perhaps we will terminate the use of the title doctor- -because everyone 
will have at least a Ph.D. degree. That might well become a typical result 
of our current Space Age brainpower drive." Toby Freedman, Director, 
Life Sciences, North American Aviation. Inc., announced that in his own 
field of "medical miracles," contributions exist "that to my mind have 
already paid back the cost [of the whole program]." 
Critics of the program, on the other hand, point to its huge 
costs-40 billion dollars plus for Saturn, 12 billion dollars alone for the 
construction of the Space Shuttle, and another 15 billion dollars projected 
to operate it-and ask whether the touted side effects of the space pro- 
gram could not have been achieved directly m d  more effectively by the 
expenditure of lesser sums of mcjney. Most of us want less "spaced out" 
reascns for spending the enormous amounts involved to loft such massive 
payloads as Saturn V/Apol.o 11, with such seemingly minuscule payoffs, 
whether in material benefits or psychological rewards. 
If anything. the overblown claims of space enthusiasts have come 
back to haunt them and to add to public disillusionment. Wayce Biddle 
is typical whcn he concludcs his article on the Space Shuttlcz by detailing 
i t 5  rtrohlern.. as much political as technological, and saying that "the real 
cinving h r c e  is clearly not the solid promise of cheap, routine access to 
., 
space. Space exploration, in short, has not revolutionized our lives, or 
any part of them, though it is clearly powered by mundane as well as 
purely scientific motives. 
The justification in terms of national prestige today fares no better. 
We see an American space program, whose liftoff took place as a result of 
the Cold Wat. The impetus in 1957 was clearly rivalry with the Soviety 
Union; that was justification enough for huge expenditures. Earlier ex- 
plorations. e.g., in the 16th century. did result in military conflict. 
Macabre as is the thought, even a small-scale conflict in space would rivet 
public attention on the program. Science fiction is filled with such 
wa-s-and hence "human" interest: we think of the movies, "Star 
Wars," and the TV shows, "Star Trek" and "Battlestar Galactica." (In- 
cidentally, "Star Wars" also appeals because of its peopling outer space 
with strange other humans and with imaginary animal-beings.) Our more 
fortunate and peaceful present lacks such daring, and pays the price in 
public boredom with space. In addition, with the change in public opi- 
nion afier the Vietnam war, plus our Pyrrhic victory in the space 
race-how has this really advanced us against the Russians? The military 
and national prestige motive has lost much of' its force. 
What is left? The "high" has Seen taken out of the adventure-a 
humanless spacc and a heroless program have seen to that. There are no 
heathen to missionize, no or little further military and national prestige to 
be gained immediately, and either paltrv or very long-range economic 
gains to be reaped. 
What is more, space science has been caught up in the same renil- 
sion that has manifested itself so strongly against general science in our 
contemporary culture, a revulsion whose symbolic expression has become 
the nuclcar protest. True, the revulsion is flamed bv a small, activist 
group, while the general public remains silently supportive of science. as 
polls show. But the activists have made physics znd its kin appear as a 
Pandora's box more than a cornucopia. The "Idea of progress" has lost its 
automatic conviction. 
The f m e s  justifying space exploration, therefcre, have become 
discretionar,-. A s  a dir cretionary matter, and not a matter of r~nquestioned 
national purpose, the space program is now weighed against other discre- 
tionary expenditures-cancer research urban renewal-often found want- 
ing and wac:ef~l by comparison. Until space colonization or stepped-up 
military conflict in space come along to rekindle public interest, the space 
program's chief ally seems to be leftover momentum: the fact that certain 
programs, planned long ago, happen to be under way. 
Yet, to my mind, there are two arguments that suffice to justify a 
leap into space, both of them as unprovable as they are irrefutable. The 
first is that :he flight into space changes our whole view of ourselves and 
the Earth. Th.= fact of sheer flight itself, while enormously significant, is 
not of the same order of importance. One could, of course, say. "Well, 
the spacecraft is simply an extension of the airplane. Man has flown 
already, and that's the big breakthrc~gh." In part, this argument is cat- 
rect: by jeaving the Earth in sustained flight, even if only 20 feet oif the 
ground, man changes his nature, extends it to the aves class. Within a few 
decades of Kitty Hawk. Hubert Wilkins, later Sir Hubert, flew over the 
barren wastes of the Arctic and ,lntarctic, followcd by Richard Byrd over 
the North and South Poles. Armstrong and Aldrin flying past equally 
barren wastes on the Moon, even setting foot on it, in this sense do 
nothing new. 
The newness, the greatness, resides in the fact, not of flig! of 
man's thrusting himself out into space past his terrestial abode ana the d t -  
mosphere that has nourished and protected him. As Hannah Arendt 
noted, man now occupies a position from which he can observe his own 
abode as an "outsider." both physically and phiiosophically, p o d  to 
explorc further the rest of his solar system-and beyond. It is not the 
mechanical flight, a.vtsomc as that is. but the spacial reorientation, men- 
tal as well physical, that marks :he ncw cvolutionaq ncp. 
Put vcry simply, thc Earth is now perceived as itsclf a spaceship. Sud- 
denly, all Emh is turned into a larger form of the vcry vehicles it sends in- 
:o spare-?  macrocosm^ form of the n.icroxopic projectile that is 
powered into a fucd orbit. The Earth is now conccivcd of as a "ship" 
navigating the "ocean" of space. carrying tts human crew and thcu life- 
sustaining equipment.' Now. too, thew is thc x n x  that the shrp. Fmh 
can go down, i.c.. bc shipwrecked. Only in this cut, it will have bccn the 
human crew, not the oceans of space, :hat innundate or befoul thc ship, 
and thtis wreck it. 
The Earth as spaceship, thcrcforc. is a newly imagined way of con- 
ceiving our terrcstul abode. A comparison with previous attitudes toward 
"Mothcr Earth'' shows how the conccption of a "spacccMft" frccs us-in 
a terrifying way-from the old rc?ssuranca cmbodied in the notion of 
temfinne.4 The whole Earth has become ihcddus-with no f d  land- 
ing place. psychoiogicaIly. to which to m u m  from its flight. 
The second argument justifying h e  spacc program is that it is man's 
destiny continually to test himself against the unknown to know h k ! f  
by his cxcrtions. And to my dcfcnsc I call upon an cartier tnvclcr in 
unknown space, U l v ,  cncountcrcd by Dantc in thc Inferno: 
"0 brothers," I said, "you who 
through a thousand perils have comc to the W e t .  
to thc brief vigil of our xnxs 
which is left, do not deny 
expericncc of :he unpcoplcd world 
to 5c discovered by following thc sun. 
Considcr what origin you had; 
you wcrc nor created to live like brute, 
but to x c k  virtue and knawlcdgc. " 
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The idea of space exploration

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