American Magazine: August 2014

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Q. Why is it important that humankind continue
space exploration?
A. We don’t exist on the surface of the Earth anymore.
We exist from the surface of the Earth about 25,000 miles
out in geosynchronous orbit.
We keep our weather satellites and our communication,
global positioning, and navigation systems in space. It’s as
much a part of our existence as going to Chicago, only with
Chicago you travel across the globe, and with space you go up.
Space exploration is important for commercial reasons,
for scientific reasons, for national security, and for national
prestige. We’d also like to diversify humanity onto more than
one orb.
The big move for NASA right now is public-private
partnerships. NASA has tried since 1972 to reduce the cost
of space access and they haven’t yet been successful. The
new technique is to farm it out to entrepreneurs like Elon
Musk and Richard Branson. SpaceX has already successfully
docked cargo carriers with the International Space Station.
Out of that hopefully will come technological
breakthroughs that conquer the money barrier in space.
It costs about $10,000 to launch a pound of material into
space—we need to be able to move large structures into space
less expensively.
The prestige of the space program is still terribly
important in the geopolitical forum. A great nation, a great
economy, it is thought, has to be a space-faring nation. You
can see this in China, Russia, and other nations that are
coming up like Brazil and Thailand. One of the amazing
things about the Air Malaysia loss is that it caused a lot of
nations that you didn’t think had space assets to reveal them.
It’s a club, and if you’re going to be a major world power,
you want to be a leader in the club.
HOWARD MCCURDY
School of Public Affairs professor and winner of the American
Astronautical Society’s 2013 John F. Kennedy Astronautics Award
“Public interest in
space exploration has
been fairly constant
since the Apollo years:
30 to 40 percent of
the population favors
space exploration and
an aggressive space
program. It’s a sizable
enough block to keep
the government
program for civil
space alive at about
$17 billion a year.
Military spending for
space is even greater
than that.”
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