We rise in the warm Florida darkness and drive toward Cape Canaveral, the stars fading out one by one in the sunrise. We have come to see the Columbia launch, the skeptical ethics professor and her children.
The space shuttle rumbles into fire and smoke and rises, gently, perfectly, elegantly above the clouds, and the air shakes all around us. The hushed crowd then cheers, waving the flags of the people and research on board: America, Israel, Japan, Germany, Liechtenstein, China, Australia.
“Watch,” I tell my children, “there will be a new star. You’ll see it.”
My hand is on my daughter’s soft hair, and she pulls me toward her and tells me over the roar of the liftoff: “I want to go. I want to go on that.” And I tell her she will.
It is a rare thing and a hard thing to be an astronaut, and after the Columbia mission ended so tragically, the natural thing is to ask whether it is too hard for them. That is the wrong question, because, given the amazing NASA safety record in the face of such an enormous challenge, the real question is whether we will have the wisdom and courage to know what to do now.
Can America still be the kind of place that allows dreamers to become astronauts? Will we have the courage for the sort of moral gesture that the future asks? Are we overreaching our boundaries and human limits? What does it mean to be free? How can we face death nobly? Will we use resources fairly? What do we owe to one another? What do we owe to the future we cannot know?
These are tough questions, especially just now, when the world seems a tough and desperate place, rocked by poverty, AIDS and ancient prejudices, poised at the threshold of a war.
Health care needs more money. What should we do about the economy? How can we provide housing and care for our children? How can we spend billions for space when our schools need more teachers?
The Columbia rose in the January sky against all of this. How can we justify it now?
NASA’s historical critics are eager to raise the alarm. “Not good science,” they say, “and for all that money, what have we gotten?” It is a familiar complaint–“Are we there yet?” “What did you bring me?”–but not a realistic one.
Good science is based on the essential idea that one is facing the utter unknown. That is why they call it research. Of course it might fail, and of course anything could go wrong, and of course human error means our human world is fragile. And that is why we call them heroes, these scientists who go into space.
All great science happens in the face of this fundamental, tricky uncertainty. Much of what we know we learned by mistake, as Americans should remember, at least since Columbus sailed into the Caribbean and not Bombay. The goodness of science is measured not only by how many peer-reviewed papers make it into journals, or how much cool stuff we get for it. For a society committed to democracy and justice, it also must be judged by moral claims.
Nothing on Earth is like human spaceflight.
The doing of the thing cannot be fully modeled or imagined, and if we intend to explore space it can be done only in the slow way that science works: first this careful step and then this one.
Severely hostile conditions that exist only in space allow for a unique social venue as well: a risky, distant and dangerous habitat that will need to be fully understood and made tolerable for the physical, emotional, social, political, spiritual and intellectual needs of humans.
Is it worth it?
A step-by-step process
The first step in space science is simply to explore, and merely doing that is hard, a miracle that looked only ordinary when other shuttle crews did it. The idea that basic exploration was worthwhile is one of the issues at stake.
NASA’s research had to deepen this basic task, to go toward the farthest horizons of the universe, the blank cosmic sea where who knows what might exist. NASA’s challenge is to see how we might better know, observe, understand and live there. In this, NASA also seeks to know better how we might live here on Earth.
But for many, the premise of basic science is not enough.
What can you bring me?
First, the classic claim used to justify space science is the one of dual use.
Microgravity has been found to create effects similar to aging in humans. Studies of the molecular biology of bone loss are an example of this genre of work. Research from the first 40 years of space travel is beginning to allow innovative medical research on how gravity is a critical factor in developmental, sensory and neurological orientation and balance.
Devices that monitor the crew at a distance can be used to check on the health of developing fetuses in the womb, for example, and radiation safety research in space may tell us more about cancer exposure and prevention. Such health-related research clearly will be a strong part of NASA’s future duty.
But much of what is valid about basic research is based on what we cannot yet know.
To be sure, health care is only one sort of science that would justify the efforts in space as ethical in this way. Other areas clearly include research on climate change and other earth science research accessible only from the vantage of space.
How do we know that Earth is warming? Ask NASA.
A second major justification for space exploration as a just and good endeavor, some would argue, is that it makes human society more likely to be free and at peace. The science and engineering that is intrinsic to space travel lends itself well to international cooperation. Now the future of space exploration is profoundly international in character, and space is one of the few places where the human species has the opportunity to see itself as a collective community, as earthlings.
NASA also has been a place of extraordinary diversity, one of America’s most international and multiethnic institutions.
It honors identity as well as diversity.
Ilan Ramon, child of Holocaust survivors, carried into space a Torah scroll, itself rescued from the fires of genocide, and flew as a Jew for all Jews. The diversity stretches beyond the shuttle crews. Talk to a rocket scientist and you might well discover that he grew up in a slum in Calcutta, barefoot and hungry, or that he grew up in a coal-mining town, throwing his head up to see the stars in the West Virginia night. Or that she was born in a Russian city, drawing pictures of rockets in the dust.
Funding NASA and its push into the daring unknown always has been a challenge. It would be far easier to turn away.
But someone must have asked Queen Isabella, “What of the poor of Madrid?” Congress must have asked Thomas Jefferson, “What of the poor of Baltimore?” as he wrote checks to Lewis and Clark, who would name the river they found unexpectedly in the unknown vastness of the Louisiana Territory after Columbus’ journey.
And so we name the shuttle in memory of journeys, even as we debate our history and future.
Not a zero-sum game
The claim that space science is an unjust diversion rests on an idea about science research as a zero-sum game, that if we fund research on space, we will not be funding research on cancer or malaria.
That is, I believe, a false notion: We are shaped by the interrogation itself, and it is not entirely certain who or what we would be if we turned from the task. We must, in fact, do as we always have done: the work of discovery and basic science and the necessary work of compassion.
That is what the future asks of us.
We live now at a tipping point in history, on the brink of completion of the International Space Station, a point on a continuum of human space exploration–a “first outpost.” If one is committed to the decades-long effort to explore the universe, then humankind needs to know how, and needs to continue the pursuit in slow, reasonable steps. The shuttle is a part of that.
Not tangential to this is the unique hold that space exploration has on the human imagination.
This sense of aspiration, of the vastness of our dreams and capacities to achieve them, is of no little significance, especially because the space station offers the potential not only for a visionary genre of patriotism but of a shared human imagination.
Space exploration is, in a sense, like all intergenerational scientific quests. It mirrors classic human models, cathedrals built over generations, huge human endeavors intended to bring a future toward us, a goal for our children’s children, made possible only at the cost of great risk and great courage.
The essential nature of the space station is the small chance of achieving such a difficult vision.
Science is, at its best, a language of rational, peaceful and visionary possibility. This aspect of the station must be carefully protected, both because it upholds the principle of fidelity to international agreements and because it will create the best venue for excellent research, driven by the interests of the entire international community.
A fully honest and open appraisal has always been something that NASA eagerly invites the public to witness and participate in. The Columbia tragedy does not change that, it just means that now millions of us may respond more vividly.
Such a large vision of space asks hard questions of us as a people. How is it that we are human? How is it that we are free? To what are we responsible?
Space travel teaches us that freedoms are bounded by duties, possibilities are bounded by responsibilities and that our victories are bounded by our defeats.
Courage to dream again
We are made human by what we yearn for far more than by the stuff we amass, by our reach and not our possessions, by our dreams and not our despair, and finally, by our ability to stand in the face of desperate failure and try to dream again.
We need a large, far-reaching and public discussion of what space travel means to us, and what we are ready to risk for it. The crews for the next year of flight already are in training. They know the risks and they are willing to face them. Are we courageous enough to fail and try again?
Before you answer too quickly, go outside tonight, into the hard, black winter sky, and look up. There is a legend that when a Torah scroll — like the one Ilan Ramon carried into space — burns, the letters become black fire on white fire. Look up and you’ll see the stars, and they will be white fire against the great darkness that so surrounds us and that we are so likely to forget.
Take a child with you and tell her that, if you look hard, you might see the International Space Station, our planet’s tiny spark in the universe. Throw your head back, the oldest of human gestures that reminds us that no slum, no barrio, no wheat field, no rice paddy, no back porch in Chicago is too remote for dreaming. Then be silent, and imagine the next step.
