The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth

William E. Burrows
New York University

Planetary Defense Conference 2004
Garden Grove, California
February 25, 2004


I would like to depart this morning from the specific purpose of this
conference – a discussion about protecting Earth from asteroids – to consider
the larger subject of using space to protect it from many threats, home-made
as well as celestial.

This meeting is taking place at a very fortuitous time; a time that may
see a decisive change in the way we use space. I was tempted to say that the
space program may be about to change direction. But I have a problem with
that. If "program" in this sense is defined as a coherent, articulated, national
goal, there is no space program, and hence no direction. And there has not
been one since Apollo.

What has passed for a program since the Moon landings has been
multiple projects and mini-programs, often in competition with each other.
Some of them, like solar system exploration and astronomy, have been
nothing short of brilliant. So has Earth observation in its multiple forms,
which has given us an unprecedented understanding of where we live, from
weather observation, to resource monitoring, to climate modeling, to
measuring the planet's dimensions and vital signs in extreme detail. The
benefits derived from what used to be called Mission to Planet Earth have
been incalculable.

As much cannot be said about NASA's overall mission or about the role
of its spacefaring humans. Internecine warfare between advocates of a
manned program and scientists who think keeping people in space is wasteful
and unproductive predates the space age and is still going on. Lori Garver, a
former head of the American Astronautical Society, and Robert Park, the
University of Maryland physicist, debated the issue on PBS as recently as
January 14, after President Bush announced the plan to return to the Moon,
then send astronauts to Mars and other "worlds beyond our own." I'll return
to the president's new space initiative in a moment. Lori made the point that
sending people to space is important because it fulfills humanity's need to
explore new horizons. Prof. Park countered that little or nothing worthwhile
in science investigation off-planet can be done by people. He maintained that
machines – robots – can do science better and cheaper. Humans are a liability
in space, Prof. Park said, and should therefore stay home and deal with
earthbound problems.

One of the benefits of having observed and reported on the space age
for roughly three decades is that, as Yogi would put it, it was déjà vu all over
again. It took me back James Van Allen's leading the charge against the
Space Transportation System, which includes both the shuttles and the space
station. He was particularly wrathful about the shuttles. Following the
destruction of Challenger, Van Allen published an article in Scientific
American calling the shuttle's siphoning precious funding from the Galileo,
Magellan, and other science missions "the slaughter of the innocent."
Ultimately, of course, they were not slaughtered. Galileo's investigation
of the jovian system and Magellan's radar mapping of Venus stand as among
the great science missions of the space age.

The problem with science, as Van Allen, Park, and other investigators
know, is that the average American relates to it the way he or she relates to
swallowing a whole lemon. That is why all four of Voyager's close encounters
on the Grand Tour – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – starred the
imaging team's daily slide show in Von Karman Auditorium at JPL. And that
is why NASA quickly capitalized on imagery of the Martian landscape from
Sojourner and, later, Spirit and Opportunity. The rocks and the stark red
panoramic scenes of our eternal neighbor evoked H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice
Burroughs, countless stories about aliens, and the possibility of life beyond
Earth. To the extent ordinary people can relate to anything about science
from space, they can relate to pictures. The haunting images of Saturn and its
fabled rings taken by both Voyagers are classics, and the ones of a blue and
green Earth splashed by white clouds against the black void of space have
become the icons of the environmental movement.

Knowing this from the day it came into being, and also knowing that
sending people like Yuri Gagarin to space was a dangerous but exciting feat
with which ordinary people could identify, NASA invested heavily in the
manned enterprise. The fact that life support systems were indeed incredibly
expensive made them more worthwhile to a new agency that wanted to be
both relevant and permanent.

In 1958, when NASA came into existence, the plan to send astronauts to
space followed Wernher von Braun's and others' script as laid out in an
historically important meeting at the Hayden Planetarium in New York in
1951. It was soon expanded in a series of articles in Collier's magazine from

1952 to 1954. Basically, the plan called for using shuttles to build a station
that would, in turn, be an embarkation base for manned expeditions to the
Moon and then to Mars and Venus. That blueprint was quietly put away
when John Kennedy ordered Americans to the Moon to trump the Russians
politically. Whatever the reason for sending them, their successive flights were
the greatest feats of human exploration of all time. Apollo had a clearly
articulated purpose to which most ordinary people could relate. Furthermore,
it was institutionally elaborate, requiring heavy engineering and a huge
industrial base, which spread and consolidated NASA's empire.

But Apollo's success created the kind of conundrum that was once
articulated by wary performers in vaudville in the '20s and '30s: Never follow
a dog act. What, in other words, could be staged to keep the audience's
attention after a dozen people finally walked on another world?

Apollo funding began to fall off in 1966, three years before the dog act
was performed, so it was decided to take out the old blueprint and follow it:
return to the original Space Transportation System, starting with the shuttle.
But a problem haunted NASA: unlike Apollo, STS had no overarching,
majestic, clearly-defined purpose. It was based on a vague generality: to
establish a human presence in space for the sake of establishing a human
presence in space. The problem was that von Braun and his compatriots were
for the most part engineers. So they thought like engineers. That meant they
were driven by the technological challenge of building machines that
overcame gravity to get people and other machines to space. That is, they
wanted to provide access to a new, vast, and formidably dangerous frontier.
But they left an overriding reason for doing so to others.

This created a problem for NASA that continues to this day: how to
justify a $15 billion a year budget that is, ultimately, spent in the sky for no
apparent purpose? The mantra of the zealots in the space societies was about
adventure on a new frontier and humanity's manifest destiny to explore
forever and colonize the universe; to go where no man has gone before, as
Gene Roddenberry and his colleagues put it.

NASA, however, understood that Star Trek was not going to make it
through the Congressional appropriations juggernaut. Its administrators
knew that Congressmen had industrial constituents who wanted profits, not a
search for Oz. They also knew, consciously or otherwise, that trying to match
or surpass the dog act was unrealistic. So they turned to smoke and mirrors to
sell STS.

They peddled the intuitive notion that reusables would be cheaper than
expendables. They even paid a Princeton, New Jersey think tank called
Mathematica, Inc. $600,000 in the hope it would find that the shuttle would
indeed be profitable. When Mathematica reported that only a marginal $100
million would be saved during the write-off period between 1978 and 1990,
NASA told it to recalculate the savings based on a mind-boggling 714 flights
during that 12-year period. That was more than a flight a week, each one of
which was supposed to haul 65,000 pounds to orbit at $50 a pound. But
NASA would never even come close to that. It would eventually average
about five shuttle flights a year, costing close to $.5 billion a flight. The cost of
lifting one pound of payload to orbit would therefore be $10,000.

Meanwhile, the space agency decided to eliminate the shuttle's
competition by killing the expendable program, and scrounge for every
conceivable mission for both the shuttle and the station. The emphasis was on
public relations. STS was sold as being important for manufacturing perfect
ball bearings in near-zero gravity, doing experiments to cure such dread
diseases as cancer and AIDS, opening the way to the human exploration of
Mars, carrying school and other science projects in relatively cheap so-called
getaway specials, launching spacecraft that could have gone on expendables,
giving rides to foreign honorary astronauts, coming up with Teacher in Space
and Journalist in Space programs to reach wider audiences, and a great deal
more. In the most honest of all possible worlds, the manned program would
be called Make Work. It was an exercise in elaborate deception.
Whatever else it represented, the Columbia tragedy was a horrific
symbol of the space agency's dilemma. Lost in the televised disintegration of
the orbiter, the recriminations that followed, and the thorough accident
investigation, were the details of its mission. Seven exceptional human beings
were killed, and a $1.8 billion spacecraft lost, carrying science experiments
that could have gone on an expendable. These included an Israeli dust
experiment and a fast reaction science payload, as well as a large research
module loaded with other experiments, many of them biological. Also
included in the science package were spiders, bees, scummy Central Park
pond water, urine, a magnetized New York City MetroCard, and other things
for "science experiments" by American and foreign school children. One
experiment was designed to find out whether spiders would spin different
kinds of webs in near-zero gravity. Another was intended to see whether
ordinarily short-tempered bees would become even more so in space. Fifteen
harvester ants from Syracuse, New York, were also on board to have their
dispositions checked in an "Ants in Space" project. The urine,
euphemistically called "space water," came from kids in Idaho and was to be
mixed with paint to see whether it could be used instead of precious water to
color structures on the Moon.

Again, those "experiments" and the others could have gone on an
expendable instead of being taken on a fabulously expensive and notoriously
finicky spacecraft by people who were not necessary for the mission.
Similarly, Challenger blew up hauling a Tracking and Data Relay Satellite
that also could have gone on an expendable. Meanwhile, the International
Space Station continues to run in circles, with successive astronauts
undergoing endless and repetitive physiological tests whose purpose is to see
how the human body would react to long-duration missions that are not even
being seriously considered, let alone in the works. Every orbit carries it over
three grounded shuttles and a space agency that is hemorrhaging its most
experienced scientists, engineers, and managers, not attracting new ones
because of its perceived paralysis, and is even dependent on its collapsed cold
war rival for access to the station.

With that as prologue, I will take a few moments to share what
President Bush recently called his vision of the future in space. On January
14, as I mentioned, he delivered an address at NASA headquarters that called
for returning to the Moon to establish a base from which humans will set out
to explore "worlds beyond our own," including Mars. Like a similar plan
announced by his father on the steps of the National Air and Space Museum
in 1989, the president's "space initiative" was long on rousing rhetoric and
short on specifics. (He even invoked the spirit of Lewis and Clark.)
The president solemnly announced that the surviving shuttles would be
retired in six years and replaced by a crew exploration vehicle – that's vehicle
singular – that would take astronauts first to the Moon and then to Mars. No
additional details on the remarkably versatile spacecraft were given. Since
there would be no manned access to space between the shuttles' grounding in
2010 and the all-purpose crew vehicle's launch four years later, it would
require a great deal of luck to reach the Moon and then Mars. But that won't
actually be a problem because all of this is fundamentally delusional. The
president said his space initiative will require an extra $1 billion over the next
five years – that a mere $200 million a year – and the diversion of $11 billion
from the shuttle's $86 billion budget over the same period of time. But that
would be just a tiny down payment. It, too, falls so far short of the actual
amount of funding that would be required to build a base on the Moon by
2020 that it could have been written by Lewis Carroll. When his father
proposed essentially the same scheme after, as he later confided, being "set
up" by NASA, the estimates ranged from $400 billion to $500 billion.

What worried the space science community about the so-called initiative
was that it would take a hit to pay for the president's "vision thing." It didn't
have long to wait. Two days after the space plan was announced, Sean

O'Keefe told stunned astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute
that there will be no more re-supply and refurbishing missions by a shuttle to
Hubble. The telescope that has been the crown jewel of astronomy for a
decade, is one of the truly great science instruments of all time, and is the
closest thing we have ever had to a time machine, will therefore be allowed to
die, possibly as early as 2007.

O'Keefe's rationale for abandoning Hubble is that refurbishing it on a
shuttle mission would pose an unacceptable risk for the spacecraft and its
crew, since there would be no hope of rescuing them in case of an emergency,
as there would be if they were on a mission to the station. This has
disgruntled Walter Cunningham, who flew on Apollo 7, the first manned
Apollo mission, and many other space agency veterans, including scientists.
Cunningham recently attacked O'Keefe's decision on several grounds. Risk of
catastrophic failure is greatest at launch, he said, with the shuttle's main
engines being the chief culprits. Next comes re-entry. Neither of these is
related to the mission. Cunningham went on to make the point that risk is
still not precisely understood, but that it is generally comparable for all
missions. More important, the veteran astronaut concluded, the Hubble
decision reflects a failure of will in a once bold agency that is now broadly
characterized as having "the wrong stuff." "If we fail at something," he said,
"it should be because we are unable to do it, not because we are unwilling to
try it in the first place. Our attitude in that golden age of flying to the Moon
could be summed up in the thought, 'If this mission fails, it won't fail because
of me!' Now, the administrator seems to be saying, 'If anyone dies in space, it
won't be because of a decision I made.'"

(I should mention as a footnote that Cunningham thereby became one
of the growing number of members of the space community who, however
unintentionally, are breaching the ancient rift between those in the manned
program who think people belong in space, and scientists – notably, of course,
James Van Allen – who have traditionally argued that space is about science
and sending people there is both scientifically unnecessary and phenomenally
wasteful of resources.)

As disturbing as the Hubble Space Telescope's fate is, it is
overshadowed by a more pernicious problem. In reporting President Bush's
speech, The New York Times noted that: "With the nation deeply divided
along partisan lines on the most pressing issues of the day, including the war
in Iraq, tax cuts and the environment, Mr. Bush's political advisers backed
the plan as a way of associating the president with a unifying and uplifting
election year goal that transcends politics."

My only quibble with that analysis is that, to the contrary, the plan is as
political as it is unattainable. The president is not likely to care, however,
because he will have left office before it is supposed to start and his successor
will want to set his or her own priorities in space.
I have one. Use it to protect Earth and our collective civilization.
Spaceguard, which began cataloguing kilometer-or-larger Earth-crossing
asteroids in 1998 – rocks that could carry the potential for catastrophe – is a
first step in that direction. Last summer, NASA's Near-Earth Object Science
Definition Team issued a report calling for the cataloguing of ninety percent
of Earth-crossing asteroids larger than 140 meters. As you know better than
I, there are many more asteroids that size passing through the neighborhood
than the larger ones, meaning the probability of a collision is higher. And
while a 140-meter asteroid moving at 25,000 miles an hour would not end
civilization on impact, it would turn a large city and perhaps millions of
people into a smoking ditch.

The problem with searching for the smaller ones, as you also know, is
not technology. It is money. As Alan W. Harris of JPL, among others, has
noted: it's strictly cost-benefit. Severely limited funds cannot be used to
search for the relatively little guys. And when I say limited, I mean just that.
Spaceguard's annual budget is $3.5 million. To put it in perspective, that is
almost eight times less than the $27 million NASA is spending to repair the
sliding doors on the seldom-used Vehicle Assembly Building.

It is time change direction. Access to space for the first time provides
humanity with the means of protecting itself against a wide variety of
potentially devastating threats. Some of those means are already in place.
Obviously an anemic Spaceguard is one of them. So is an armada of satellites
that monitor resources and short- and long-term environmental problems –
the destruction of rain forests, pollution, and the effects of global warming
being three of them – warn of dangerous weather like hurricanes and
blizzards, survey earthquake and volcano areas, and watch (and listen) for
superweapon proliferation and terrorist activity. It is also vital that we
drastically reduce the fossil fuel threat by orbiting satellites that would reflect
clean solar energy to Earth. All of these should be coordinated into a
Planetary Protection Program, run jointly by NASA, NOAA, the Department
of Energy, the military, and the collective intelligence establishment, whose
goal would surpass Apollo's.

The program would move people off Earth for a continuous presence in
orbit, perhaps in large stations at L-4 and L-5, on one or more captured
asteroids, and certainly in a large, self-sustaining colony on the Moon. The
reason for keeping large numbers of people off Earth was clearly explained by

Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes in their epic space novel, Encounter with Tiber.
Osepok, the captain of a colossal intergalactic space cruiser, justifies the long
journey to her crew this way: "There's not a place in the universe that's safe
forever; the universe is telling us, 'Spread out, or wait around and die.'"

Settling the Moon is better than going to Mars for a number of obvious
reasons having to do with cost and technology. But it also has to do with the
fact that should the home planet run into a catastrophe, a rescue mission
would take three or four days to get here, not six months to a year. In
addition, some of us believe that a continuously updated archive of our
civilization should be kept at a number of places on Earth, and also on the
Moon, as a backup in case the original records of our entire civilization,
including DNA and other living matter, are destroyed. We call our group the
Alliance to Rescue Civilization, or ARC, and we would like it to develop into
an international organization that would preserve Earth's whole record into
the infinite future.

Ray Erikson, a very bright and creative aerospace engineer who has
read portions of the manuscript of The Survival Imperative for errors (and
found them), has said that humans are short-term thinkers with what he calls
a "fight or flee" mentality. Others agree and say the unfortunate trait may be
genetic. Whatever its cause, it has to be overcome for the ultimately most
important reason: survival.

That is the most compelling of all reasons to go to space, and if tourism
and exploiting the Moon and asteroids for resources, and other economic
incentives help to get the process underway, so be it. What is important is
that we create a program whose overarching goal is to use space to protect
Earth. We owe posterity no less.

ENDIT