SIMBERG@USC-ECL.ARPA (Rand Simberg) (10/24/85)
For those who are interested, here is the testimony that I presented to
the Space Commission.
Rand Simberg
437 Whiting St.
El Segundo, CA
Dear Dr. Paine,
As a result of your request for suggestions, you and your
commission have no doubt received many ideas from many people on
appropriate goals and visions for our future space program. While I
offer no new technical concepts or missions to add to your abundant
list, I would like to present a few thoughts that may help you to
organize and unify those that you have received.
Before selecting visions for our relationship with space,
setting goals, and deriving programs needed to carry them out, it is
vital to determine what criteria a future direction in space should
satisfy. The criteria that I would choose are the following:
o the visions or philosophies should be of obvious value and
acceptable to the American public;
o increments of them should be immediately achievable; and
o carrying them to completion should require a great deal of time.
The first criterion is needed to assure the acceptance of the
vision. It also provide a means to prioritize this program among
other national goals. The second criterion provides intermediate
benefits in the short-term; thus, visible progress will demonstrate
the utility of the program, and ensure continuing support for it.
The last criteria will prevent the vision from dying through
fulfilment, as, in the most notable example, the Apollo program did.
To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, what is needed is a goal that is not
so difficult as to be unachievable, nor so easy as to be trivial.
Having defined the criteria, I will now attempt to come up with
some unifying visions that satisfy them. Based upon my criteria, I
have chosen four broad goals for future space programs:
1) To aid us in properly husbanding our earthly resources
2) To expand our knowledge of the universe
3) To open up the resources and wealth of the rest of the
universe to humanity
4) To ensure that the values upon which this nation was
founded (i.e. individual freedom and human rights) are
preserved as our species expands into the universe
The first goal is perhaps the most pressing. Despite the recent
depression in commodity prices, and the ingenuity with which we met
many of the resource "crises" of the recent past, we still must
recognize that our earthly resources are finite, and that we must be
proper stewards of our planet, the only currently known abode of
life. This includes not only managing our resources more wisely, in
the sense of improved agricultural and industrial productivity, but
also using space to aid in the prevention of pollution and other
hazards to our apparently unique biosphere. Appropriate programs to
meet this goal would include more advanced weather and remote sensing
satellites, as well as increasing the ability of all citizens to
communicate and receive data on a global basis. There are many
government policies that could be changed, with little or no public
expenditure, to encourage this.
Private investment and endeavors that collect knowledge of
environmental conditions, distributing information globally, or make
stored data available should be encouraged. The ultimate goal for
this program should be to give each citizen of the Earth enough
information to understand his or her surroundings, and to eventually
allow all of the processes of the entire Earth to be understood.
This program supports the principle of free flow of information,
while encouraging the development of technologies directly applicable
to the Information Age that we are now just entering.
The second goal, expansion of our understanding of the universe,
takes this first goal and directs it outwards. Only a few centuries
ago, the horizon of human knowledge was bounded by the physical
horizon. The search for knowledge uplifts us spiritually and is a key
characteristic that, as a species, sets us apart from the other
inhabitants of this planet. The progress of man and an improvement of
the human condition depends upon human curiosity and willingness to
discover new things. Exploring space and attempting to understand
what we have found and are finding there will inevitably produce new
developments to improve life on Earth.
As our society continues to grow, it will eventually approach the
limits of the Earth. Ultimately, the only way to effectively bypass
our Earth-bound limits to growth is to carry out the third goal,
availing ourselves of the abundant resources in the Solar System. A
well-planned program of asteroidal and planetary exploration will, in
addition to telling us much about the origin of our solar system and
the universe beyond, point the way to new sources of material and
energy for humanity. Using these new resources in space will reduce
the costs of space operations, allowing the program to become self
sustaining, and make even more and cheaper resources available. In
time, perhaps even within your fifty year planning horizon, the costs
of space resources will be reduced to the point where they can be
economically substituted for terrestrial materials, relieving many of
the environmental pressures on our long-suffering planet.
The fourth goal, value and freedom preservation, should be kept
in mind as we contemplate international space ventures. While
international space missions have many benefits to offer in reduced
costs, shared knowledge, and improved relations, we must be careful
that, in our zeal to promote such programs, we not lose sight of those
values that make our nation almost unique among the world community.
Agreements such as the appropriately ill-fated United Nations Moon
Treaty tend to ignore those ideals for which we fought over two
hundred years ago. Constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, and those
rights guaranteed in the U.N. Charter, must be adequately safeguarded.
A prudent national space program will ensure that our ideological
adversaries not be allowed the capability to quarantine our nation and
its hard-fought values on the Earth, while at the same time we must
guarantee access to space by all cultures and beliefs, to preserve
human diversity.
I would like to conclude on a cautionary note. Many people,
equating boldness with sheer technological prowess, will urge you to
set goals such as a manned mission to Mars, or some other specific
technical achievement that may not necessarily be part of a long-term,
well thought-out plan. While it is important and useful, for many
reasons, to carry out manned planetary exploration, it is much more
important to develop the logistic nodes necessary to facilitate many
and varied space missions. Although the Apollo program was a
remarkable technical achievement, and has paid for itself many times
over, the returns from it would have been incomparably greater had it
been done as one building block of a rationally paced scheme to first
establish ourselves in low earth orbit and then gone on to the moon to
stay. We should not repeat the same mistake we made with Apollo of
setting an expensive, short-term, accomplishable goal without also
building up an enduring space economy.
Your commission has been granted an historic opportunity to
finally and firmly set our nation's space program in the proper
direction. A truly bold space program will not consist of amazing
technical feats; it should consist rather of developing the necessary
on-orbit facilities and capabilities that allow space operations to
become self-sustaining, and so render going to Mars, or indeed the
asteroids or Galilean moons, a trivial and routine affair. It should
be made so easy, in fact, that it will become commonplace, and not be
subject to the whims of Earth-bound legislatures. If this occurs, the
Space Commission will have achieved what should be its true purpose:
to make a National Space Commission totally superfluous to the
everyday activities of hundreds and thousands of humans living and
working in space.