The Interstellar Age Read Online Free
Author: Jim Bell
continued, “and your grown-up scientist brain takes over. Those of us who have had that feeling want to keep coming back for more, and we want others to have that feeling too.”
A PLANETARY SOCIETY
The robotic exploration of space is, in fact, human exploration. It’s just that the humans doing the exploring haven’t left this planet. And that’s why the story of the Voyagers and their travels to the edge of the solar system and beyond is a story of the human drama of deep-space exploration. Voyager ’s saga is one of discovery and adventure but also of risk and frustration, successes as well as sacrifices, consensus and conflict, the historic mingling with the mundane. Scientists, engineers, managers, technicians, artists, students, and countless other professionals designed the mission and built the spacecraft, guided them on their Grand Tour of the outer solar system, helped take the photos and make the discoveries that now fill our textbooks, and still help us communicate with the spacecraft today on their continuing interstellar voyages. When historians five hundred years from now look back, the accomplishments of this particular group of people will be among the most important remembrances of our time.
But many other people have had an important albeit indirect role as well. As a student, I learned about and joined a new organization that my hero Carl Sagan had helped form in 1980 called The Planetary Society. The Planetary Society is the world’slargest public-membership space-advocacy organization, and its beginnings are as tied to Voyager as my own. America in the late 1970s was in a state of national crisis: high inflation, high prices (and even rationing) of oil and gas, and federal budget deficits rising to levels not seen in decades. Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 partly as a result of a national backlash against President JimmyCarter’s administration’s inability to get the economy back on track. Reagan interpreted his mandate to be to recover the economy by promoting business growth (this is when the term “Reaganomics” was coined) and cutting taxes and federal spending. Specifically, that meant cutting nondiscretionary federal spending—the programs not related to defense or Social Security or Medicare and other entitlements. NASA found itself on the chopping block for massive potential budget cuts, initiated by Reagan’s chief of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), David Stockman.
I don’t know whether Stockman liked NASA or not, but it didn’t matter—even though its fraction of the federal budget was less than 1 percent (as it is today—now less than 0.5 percent, in fact), the space agency was an easy target for budget cutters. “Why should we spend money on searching for little green men,”some in Congress have asked ( really ), “when we have so many other pressing needs here at home?”
Why should American taxpayers support NASA? I believe it’s because we like satellite launches, space shuttles, moon landings, Mars landings, and cutting-edge materials and computers and communications technology and products . . . even Tang, at least for a while. Most important, however, as is obvious to anyone who spends time around scientists like Ed Stone or Heidi Hammel, or science popularizers like Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson, there are critically important intangibles in this pursuit that feed our souls. Some of the intangibles of supporting NASA—results for which we cannot predict their future influence on our society or our planet—include the inspiration and education of our young people, the gathering of pure knowledge about the worlds around us and ourplace in the universe, and of course national pride in American leadership in exploring the greatest frontier there is.
The national debate and budget-cutting angst of the early 1980s was happening right on the heels of the spectacular Voyager flybys of Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980. These planets
A PLANETARY SOCIETY
The robotic exploration of space is, in fact, human exploration. It’s just that the humans doing the exploring haven’t left this planet. And that’s why the story of the Voyagers and their travels to the edge of the solar system and beyond is a story of the human drama of deep-space exploration. Voyager ’s saga is one of discovery and adventure but also of risk and frustration, successes as well as sacrifices, consensus and conflict, the historic mingling with the mundane. Scientists, engineers, managers, technicians, artists, students, and countless other professionals designed the mission and built the spacecraft, guided them on their Grand Tour of the outer solar system, helped take the photos and make the discoveries that now fill our textbooks, and still help us communicate with the spacecraft today on their continuing interstellar voyages. When historians five hundred years from now look back, the accomplishments of this particular group of people will be among the most important remembrances of our time.
But many other people have had an important albeit indirect role as well. As a student, I learned about and joined a new organization that my hero Carl Sagan had helped form in 1980 called The Planetary Society. The Planetary Society is the world’slargest public-membership space-advocacy organization, and its beginnings are as tied to Voyager as my own. America in the late 1970s was in a state of national crisis: high inflation, high prices (and even rationing) of oil and gas, and federal budget deficits rising to levels not seen in decades. Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 partly as a result of a national backlash against President JimmyCarter’s administration’s inability to get the economy back on track. Reagan interpreted his mandate to be to recover the economy by promoting business growth (this is when the term “Reaganomics” was coined) and cutting taxes and federal spending. Specifically, that meant cutting nondiscretionary federal spending—the programs not related to defense or Social Security or Medicare and other entitlements. NASA found itself on the chopping block for massive potential budget cuts, initiated by Reagan’s chief of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), David Stockman.
I don’t know whether Stockman liked NASA or not, but it didn’t matter—even though its fraction of the federal budget was less than 1 percent (as it is today—now less than 0.5 percent, in fact), the space agency was an easy target for budget cutters. “Why should we spend money on searching for little green men,”some in Congress have asked ( really ), “when we have so many other pressing needs here at home?”
Why should American taxpayers support NASA? I believe it’s because we like satellite launches, space shuttles, moon landings, Mars landings, and cutting-edge materials and computers and communications technology and products . . . even Tang, at least for a while. Most important, however, as is obvious to anyone who spends time around scientists like Ed Stone or Heidi Hammel, or science popularizers like Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson, there are critically important intangibles in this pursuit that feed our souls. Some of the intangibles of supporting NASA—results for which we cannot predict their future influence on our society or our planet—include the inspiration and education of our young people, the gathering of pure knowledge about the worlds around us and ourplace in the universe, and of course national pride in American leadership in exploring the greatest frontier there is.
The national debate and budget-cutting angst of the early 1980s was happening right on the heels of the spectacular Voyager flybys of Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980. These planets
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