The President’s Message:
“Yeah, but. . .”

by Steve Bartlett

Over the past few months, I’ve been urging our membership to contact their elected officials to support manned missions beyond low Earth. So I and other members of the Board have been “putting our money where our mouths are” and writing letters to the administration and to our various Congresspeople and Senators. Well we’ve received some responses from out Washington way and, for those of us living in a state that’s been heavily dependent on aerospace for the past seventy years or so, they’ve been a little troubling.

All of the responses have paid lip service to the importance of NASA and space exploration and lauded the long-term goal of sending humans to the Moon or Mars. Then comes the inevitable “Yeah, But . . .”

We’ve all experienced “Yeah, but . . .”’s: those situations where someone tells you over and over again how much they agree with what you’re saying, oftentimes with vigorous nodding of the head, and then they contradict you.

In the context of human space exploration, the “Yeah, But . . .” from many of our elected officials is “Yeah, it’s a great idea. But not now. Let’s do it later,” or “Yeah, it’s a great idea. But someone else should do it first.” And the writer will cite his or her own big concern or priority of the day. These days, its big federal deficits or spending on anti-terrorism efforts or military operations in Iraq or the economy or tax cuts.

And the letter writers’ imply that once that particular problem is solved, we’ll be ready to go out into space.

Only it doesn’t work that way. Because (to borrow a line from the old Saturday Night Live character, Roseanne Rosannadanna) “It’s always something.” Regardless of whether or not we decide to head into space, we’re always going to have problems of one sort or another: social problems, economic problems, environmental problems, military problems, energy problems, class problems, race problems, technological problems, health problems, you name it. It’s just the nature of being human.

If NASA was eliminated today and its entire budget re-allocated to other programs, the major problems we face today would still be there. In fact, some of them would get worse. And if the space agency’s budget were increased by twenty or thirty percent, those problems would not get any worse and might, in fact, get better.

We rely on a daily basis on space technology. Communications satellites relay our phone conversations, our pager messages, our television programming, and our package locations from one place to another on a continuous basis. Weather satellites provide us with the latest climate data for most of the world. Global Positioning System satellites tell us where we are and where we’re going any place on the Earth. All of these are derived from federal investment in space.

We gain other benefits from space exploration as well. Much of our understanding of Earth’s environment is derived from observing the environments of other planets: their atmospheric flow patterns, their energy balance, their interaction between their surfaces and their atmospheres, and the like. Many industries that exist today, including microcomputers, owe their existence to the space program.

A program to return to the Moon and to head onto Mars will provide us with a wealth of new technologies, new materials, new ways of doing things and looking at the world around us. Solving the technical problems of power, propulsion, life support systems, local transportation, human interactions in close quarters, long term operations at remote locations, robotics, and other challenges at a lunar or Martian base will deliver to us a wealth of new tools and techniques. These tools and techniques can be used to make life back home a little easier and might help us to solve some of those major Earthly problems I cited earlier.

The fact of the matter is that if we, as a people, believe that human exploration and settlement of space is important and that it should be done, then we have to decide that now is the time to do it and now is the time to pull together what it takes to do it. And we have to convince our elected officials that this is important to us and, if they won’t support it, we will replace them with others who will.

Back at the height of the Apollo lunar exploration program, the country was going through major social upheavals, fighting a war in Vietnam, financing a war on poverty, dealing with assassinations at home and abroad, and other substantial problems. But the people and the leaders of the time decided that going to the Moon was important and stayed the course until the goal was achieved.

It’s time for us to convince our friends, our neighbors, and those who represent us that now is the time to go back to the Moon and on to Mars and that “Yeah, But . . .”’s won’t work anymore.

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