Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: U.S. needs its space

Friday, Dec. 10, 1999 | 8:55 a.m.

Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.

RUN SILENT and run deep.

This time it is not submarines but, rather, space vehicles that are running silent, deep into the outer reaches of planetary exploration. Actually, the latest silent running effort of NASA is somewhere on the surface of the Red Planet. It isn't supposed to be that way but something happened to the Mars Polar Lander on its way to space history.

In fact, from all signs coming in and out of NASA headquarters, the $135 million Mars exploratory craft is a piece of space history, no matter how much the folks at home would wish otherwise. So are the paltry $29 million probes that rode the final trip to oblivion with the Polar Lander. And so, too, is the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter which vanished into very thin air just a few months ago.

You know, if you start adding up the dollar figures that are associated with space failures, you will quite soon enough come up with a figure that represents real money, even in this time of Internet wonders and other great riches. And those are dollars lost during NASA's new program of saving space dollars by running smaller, cheaper missions. Can you imagine the price tag for the kind of missions NASA used to run?

I am spreading these figures about to make a point. First, when the space probes and their exploratory hosts were launched, nobody paid too much attention to the price tags. The mission was paramount and the prospects of discovery so overwhelming that the few millions or hundreds of them that the taxpayers were spending were considered inconsequential given the likelihood of success. But as soon as the Polar Lander turned lost and could not be found despite the space agency's best efforts, out came the price tags for public consumption.

The cynics among us might ask why? Why all of a sudden is there a preoccupation with the price of things when minutes before the disappearance all eyes, ears and thoughts were on the great potential for new and undiscovered information about Earth's origins and the opportunity for mankind to live as humans on other planets?

I don't know the answer to that question but I do have a thought or two on the subject.

First, I have always been a proponent of space travel. Even when budgets were tight for good reasons, I favored continued exploration knowing that the money would have to be found from other less critical programs. I must admit that I was in a distinct minority, which makes sense given the always great need for seemingly more pressing matters much closer to home. After all, it is very difficult to argue for spending hundreds of millions of dollars when children cry out from hunger in our own cities on Earth.

Second, in this day and age screaming about the price of things always elicits a response from the citizenry. That results in attention being paid, which means ratings points and circulation gains. In other words, let's find a way to make money on these misfortunes. If the answer to the question is outside of these two concepts then I am more than willing to learn something new.

What concerns me a great deal about the stories and the way they continue to be played -- that is the overemphasis on the cost of failure -- is the likelihood that the voters may pressure their representatives in Congress to pull the plug on NASA and our space efforts. As much as I favored continued exploration when this country did not have the money, I have to be more vocal in its favor at a time when we do have the wherewithal to continue.

And make no mistake, the United States of America is wealthy enough to seek new worlds in space while we repair the world we have at home. The only thing we are missing is the willingness to do what most of us know is the right thing. It is too easy, for example, to cry out against government waste and abuse -- don't you just love those words by now -- and use that as a rallying cry against any kind of expenditure that is not perceived as directly benefiting the individuals yelling loudest.

Spending money on the other guy has never been less favored in this country than it has for the past two decades. Ever since the "me" generation took effect, the idea of building something for those who come later has not fared very well when put up against the immediacy of spending money for those of us around today.

And nowhere is this more evident than in the study of outer space. When I was a kid, Jules Verne's science fiction was just that -- fiction. And now as we approach the 21st century, his science fiction is fast becoming a fact of our everyday lives. There is little question that the progress made in the past 50 years will pale in comparison to that which we learn in the very next decade. Men in spacesuits? That's old hat. Men walking on the moon? Been there, done that. People living in outer space for months at a time? That will probably happen sooner than we can pop the cork on 2002.

The point is that we owe to our children and theirs the continued quest for knowledge about who we are, where we come from and how we get someplace else in this universe should the need arise. While it costs an incredibly large amount of money to carry on that effort -- especially when we lose a multi-hundred million dollar lander from time to time -- the cost of not doing it while we can will be astronomical.

We live in a country that can afford to do almost everything we need to do to better mankind on Earth while we search for newer and better ways to live beyond the gravitational pull of this planet. To do less -- because we are frightened by the price tag or convinced that the money would be better spent elsewhere -- is to deny the great gifts that science is laying at our feet.

When President John F. Kennedy promised that the first man on the moon would be an American, nobody said no and nobody doubted that it would happen. And nobody let a few errant and costly probes jeopardize the great prize. And everybody will remember the day it happened.

Yesterday it was the moon. Tomorrow there is so much more for America to conquer. We can do it smarter. We may be able to do it more cost effectively. But do it we must. So let's get on with it.