I write this in response to the `Space Shuttle is America' diary that I caught on the rescue. Maybe this one will have to be rescued as well. The first part is just some general ideology, the second will focus more on the Shuttle itself.
I write mainly because I have always been a believer in space exploration, even as I have had to slowly but surely reconcile this belief with others I have come to hold that make me slightly liberal - although recent history and living in the South reclassify me as fully liberal.
It took some reflection, and I don't believe my answer is entirely original, but it is heartfelt. And if you follow me below the fold, I would like to try and relate it to you.
The main point of conflict I once had concerned the environment up there. For the environment up there, I had great difficult with what I think is one of the strongest purely rational reasons to go out there. Frankly, our solar system has more accessible resources than we can ever hope to scratch out of our hope planet. This fact has been described in enumerable locations, although one of the better ones is Gerard O'Neil's High Frontier. At the same time as I marvel at the high technology he hoped to see displayed (especially when I imagine a circa 2000 remake with our advances), I used to feel a little twinge about exporting our base desires for acquisition and exploitation. The space operas and romances wanted me to consider this amazing frontier as something more than Appalachia in the Twenty-First Century.
The plan was to go to the moon and to Mars and all the strange and alien places out there because they were strange and alien. They would teach us about our own world just by illuminating the true range of possibilities. What if our rocks were just a slightly different composition? What are the chemistries that could lead to the beginnings of life? The original NASA vision (the one that the scientists seemed to have at least) was that we would be more or less passive observers, increasing our knowledge and seeing what the solar system is really about. But that struck me as kind of strange as well. If we had this capability, doesn't a democratic ideal require that it should be possible for anyone to participate in the new frontier?
It is true that NASA funds technologies that no one else would likely have paid for, just like the military does. But in this rationale, I always have to ask the same question as I do for military expenditures. Wouldn't we have even more and more useful technology if we threw the money directly at what we needed rather than having the new tech as a side effect of learning how to kill better? As with NASA - most NASA tech is about flying is space. The side effects definitely sweeten the package, but it is hard to sell the car on the free keychain or mountain bike that comes with it.
Where do these thoughts lead? Here is my eventual synthesis. The High Frontier was written just after the Limits to Growth was published. As Malthusian as it sounds, there is a simple fact that exponential growth on finite resources is eventually going to lead to trouble. This is a fact of life - exponential growers are inherently expansionist (otherwise they stop growing or crash). With the Earth more or less nearing its own limits, the answer is obvious and ignored only at general peril - we must go upward if we intend to continue the expansion route.
But, Odin, you must surely say, we are green people! We have been saying the exponential growth thing is the crazy bit that must be knocked off. I may agree, but here, I become the full progressive. I believe in progress. I believe we have been making it, and I believe it is inherent to people. I am smarter than my parents (yes, I know all kids tend to think that, but in this case it is true) - my world was more complex and information-rich than theirs. In the same way, the lives of my parents' parents were simpler and more backward.
We have been steadily stepping out from under the biological imperatives the world has given us. Sex no longer means pregnancy - a simple fact that I was born into, but my parents and grandparents can still remember a time when this was not true. I can't believe we have had only fifty or so years to come to grips with this fact that radically changes human society. We also no longer have to grow our own food or starve, thirty years of life is not old age, and there are parts of the world where life is no longer brutal, nasty and short. In fact, there are parts of the world where this has not been true for multiple generations.
We now have an idea of where we had come from and where we are going. We understand this world and those beyond it better every day. Those ancient fears of the dark - fire, predators, starvation and disease, are now actually under our control. Of course, we have some new ones, but those will likely be brought to heel eventually.
And the largest, most impressive bit of progress is this one: humans aren't exponential growers any more. Chew on that for a moment. The latest forecasts are that human populations will indeed stabilize at some point mid-century. As people get wealthier (now armed with birth control), they procreate less. And so, the population problem is no longer an explosion, it is a bottleneck. It will be a large problem still, but it is now finite. It can be attacked.
I would like to see the entire world capable of an American lifestyle (whether they choose to live it is of course entirely their own decision), one of relative comfort and health. Choose the European or Asian tiger of your choice to replace the above if you aren't so keen on the American lifestyle - the key is one of relative freedom from want.
But there is a problem - the Earth likely could not sustain the entire world at these levels, and again we are back to space travel. Again, this may be a point of high optimism - but I am beginning to believe that there is a point of satiability inherent in people. In the same way that the population will level off, there may be a point at which the level of material desire per capita reaches a point of no-growth or even slight decline. That does not mean there will be nothing to do - there is always a bustle of activity in renewal and improvement. This point will not likely be reached with terrestrial resources. That is the key result that unlocks the question that I had dared not to ask myself for some time - why go to space?
Here is my answer: To buy time for our next step in evolution. Maybe even to cause that evolution. That time has been bought over and over again in our history. Most recently, that time was bought through the re-colonization of the American continents. It allowed for the growth of a stable society that believed in the rule of law, not of men. It brought about one of those rare societies of a diamond (with a "fat middle"), not pyramid, organization, and gave it a chance to prove itself in the world. This society was also coupled with Enlightenment ideals of science, thrusting us to the highest level of understanding yet reached.
This is likely a statement of faith - if we keep living, we keep improving. It may be strange to think of the desire to keep living as a crusade, but in the case of space travel, it may well be.
The first stage of this crusade has belonged to NASA. I believe that it almost too easy to bash this organization nowadays. Some of these criticisms are almost too harsh. Yes, I see the remaining budget of the Shuttle on the order of six or seven billion dollars. I can think of a lot of places in space architecture to put that money. I doubt it would cost more than two or three of them to find a way to finish (and I mean really finish, not the two or three modules likely to be tacked on by 2010) the station with Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles and astronauts shuttled up on Soyuz.
Shuttle may have cost us far too much for this, but hindsight is twenty-twenty. The reality of the Shuttle and station (along with the Russian experiences with Mir and its predecessors) is that they have taught us a great deal about continually operating in space. And space is a weird environment - no gravity, radiation breaking everything down, residual forces from freefalling around the planet, and so on. Entire bookshelves, filled to the brim with microfiche slides, are available in my library with this information. And that's just the stuff they've released. It may have been expensive, but at the same time there was a lot of fumbling around in the dark to try and get this knowledge.
The Space Turkey, as some would call it, is more or less cooked. There isn't much to gain from beating on it, although than to puff oneself up. This first-generation reusable has done what it had to for a great deal of time. It is also worth remembering that nothing better has come along because no one is willing to spend the upfront money, upfront mind you, to develop something better. Because, realistically, traditional space markets have insufficient demand to justify it. Read the Futron forecasts if you do not believe me.
But, I also see a lot of room for hope. A lot of NASA is getting to do what it has really wanted to do since Nixon tried to knife it to death so long ago - go explore the solar system with machines
and men. The private sector (and not just the primes) is finally getting involved in space, and you have no idea how excited this makes us all. There is a new space market - private flights by people - that looks sizable enough to draw all the capital we need to finally make a robust space industry. It also has the appropriate structure to incentivize dramatic cost reductions, which we need to enable the next step of this drive into space.
We may be taking the roundabout route so far, but as I've said, I believe the end result is more than important enough for us to keep plugging away. The Shuttle has as honorable a history in this drive as anything else. It may not have been perfect, but it has taken us to the next stop. Now, it appears to be up to the wealthy fliers.
Why go? It is another arena for us to improve ourselves. And it appears to be the only place left to get sufficient resources to fuel our improvements down here.