Memories of space flight

Every day I visit NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/) to look at a picture of the universe. As I write this I am looking at a picture of M8, the Lagoon Nebula — brilliant filaments of gas and clouds of dust 5,000 light years away. Before today there were photographs of constellations, planets, solar flares, eclipses, all the things out in the unimaginable vastness of space. They’re beautiful.

But there is one element missing from these photos of the cosmos — something that would make them seem more real and less lonely. There are no people. I don’t mean extraterrestrials who look like humans, I mean humans like us. Manned space flight has all but ground to a halt.

Those of us who were kids in the 1970s took it for granted that we would go to the moon and beyond. We are the children of the Apollo space program; when we were asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, we routinely replied, “Doctor, lawyer, astronaut.” The direction we aspired to was Outward.

Since then, developments in digital technology have turned us inward. For instance we don’t listen to music together anymore, we’re all plugged into our individual players; the cinema has become less and less of a communal experience. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the overall effect has been to make the world seem a much smaller place. As our world gets smaller, our dreams shrink in order to better fit in it.

What passes for dreams these days? Eight, nine out of 10 people dream of becoming fabulously wealthy so they can live in total comfort and buy every luxury the mass media says they want. Quantitatively that’s a big dream, qualitatively it’s puny. It’s just an exaggerated version of survival, with designer trimmings. 

Going out into that starry void, finding out what’s there and whether there are others like us — that’s a dream. Many will say that space exploration is a huge expense that will not result in practical applications. Dreams have no practical applications (unless you paint them or make movies about them), but if you do not dream you literally go insane. They are for the maintenance of your mental health. 

Besides, how do we know that the solu-tions to our current problems are not out there? Cheap, renewable sources of energy, cures for disease and aging, even someplace to move to after our planet is completely exhausted. Those are the possible tangible benefits. The real benefits are intangible. As a 2008 M.I.T. report on human space flight put it, the rationale for human space flight is exploration, which it defined as “an expansion of human experience, bringing people into new places, situations and environments, expanding and redefining what it means to be human.” In short, “We need to know.” Shorter still: The Vision Thing.

Yes, it is much cheaper and way safer to send unmanned probes out into space, and it is hard to sell and defend a vision given humanity’s more pressing needs. But when we stop dreaming, we die. The rest of our lives become a formality. 

If you have the slightest interest in space exploration, there is a movie you need to see. Not Star Trek, you’ve already seen that. I mean a more down-to-earth view of human space flight: Philip Kaufman’s 1983 film The Right Stuff. Based on the book by Tom Wolfe, it dramatizes the beginnings of the space program from the fearless test pilots like Chuck Yeager who risked their lives with no expectation of reward, to the first American astronauts to go into orbit. 

The space program may have begun as a side effect of the Cold War, but it soon became more than a Soviet-US race to space. It gave a focus to humanity’s dreams.

There should be room in our mindscapes for both the dreamers and the realists. The realists keep civilization going, but it’s the dreamers who point out the destination.