Pale Blue Dot ( PDFDrive.com ) (1)

inventor of the cardiac pacemaker, who himself nearly had a coronary accident describing the
injustice of what he perceived as NASA taking credit for his device.) If there are technologies we
urgently need, then spend the money and develop them. Why go to Mars to do it?
Of course it would be impossible for so much new technology as NASA requires to be developed
and not have some spillover into the general economy, some inventions useful down here. For
example, the powdered orange juice substitute Tang was a product of the manned space program, and
spinoffs have occurred in cordless tools, implanted cardiac defibrillators, liquid-cooled garments,
and digital imaging—to name a few. But they hardly justify human voyages to Mars or the existence of
NASA.
We could see the old spinoff engine wheezing and puffing in the waning days of the Reagan-era
Star Wars office. Hydrogen bomb-driven X-ray lasers on orbiting battle stations will help perfect
laser surgery, they told us. But if we need laser surgery, if it's a high national priority, by all means
let's allocate the funds to develop it. just leave Star Wars out of it. Spinoff justifications constitute an
admission that the program can't stand on its own two feet, cannot be justified by the purpose for
which it was originally sold.
Once upon a time it was thought, on the basis of econometric models, that for every dollar invested
in NASA many dollars were pumped into the U.S. economy. If this multiplier effect applied more to
NASA than to most government agencies, it would provide a potent fiscal and social justification for
the space program. NASA supporters were not shy about appealing to this argument. But a 1994
Congressional Budget Office study found it to be a delusion. While NASA spending benefits some
production segments of the U.S. economy—especially the aerospace industry—there is no
preferential multiplier effect. Likewise, while NASA spending certainly creates or maintains jobs
and profits, it does so no more efficiently than many other government agencies.
Then there's education, an argument that has proved from time to time very attractive in the White
House. Doctorates in science peaked somewhere around the time of Apollo 11, maybe even with the
proper phase lag after the start of the Apollo program. The cause-and-effect relationship is perhaps
undemonstrated, although not implausible. But so what? If we're interested in improving education, is
going to Mars the best route? Think of what we could do with $100 billion for teacher training and
salaries, school laboratories and libraries, scholarships for disadvantaged students, research
facilities, and graduate fellowships. Is it really true that the best way to promote science education is
to go to Mars?
Another argument is that human missions to Mars will occupy the military-industrial complex,
diffusing the temptation to use its considerable political muscle to exaggerate external threats and
pump up defense funding. The other side of this particular coin is that by going to Mars we maintain a
standby technological capacity that might be important for future military contingencies. Of course,
we might simply ask those guys to do something directly useful for the civilian economy. But as we
saw in the 1970s with Grumman buses and Boeing/Vertol commuter trains, the aerospace industry
experiences real difficulty in producing competitively for the civilian economy. Certainly a tank may
travel 1,000 miles a year and a bus 1,000 miles a week, so the basic designs must be different. But on
matters of reliability at least, the Defense Department seems to be much less demanding.
Cooperation in space, as I've already mentioned, is becoming an instrument of international