Something a little different for today: as part of the process of obtaining my new job, I was asked to write an essay on why spaceflight is important to me. So I'm reusing it, because why not? This is a major side of me that doesn't find its way onto the blog very often, thanks to a shortage of publicized launches associated with my old job (I'm hoping that can change). It's shorter than my typical essays here, because I'm not trying to present research or convince anyone of anything, just talking through my personal thoughts.
At a time when many feel disillusioned by current events, a mission to send four astronauts around the moon has emerged as a kind of light in the dark, an unexpected source of encouragement and togetherness. In my opinion this only begins to illustrate the power of spaceflight and what it could mean for our common future.
Expanding the human presence in space has exciting practical implications. We may find rich new sources of minerals and move polluting industry to barren heavenly bodies, reducing the strain on earth's biosphere while upgrading current living standards. But this will only be feasible if the math checks out both economically and environmentally. The more efficient access to space becomes, in terms of both cost and resources used, the more likely we are to make damaging our own backyard with mines and hazardous waste into a thing of the past.
Broadened access to space is also a necessary defense against power monopolies. One of the best ways to ensure activities in space are conducted for the benefit of earth is to get as much of earth as possible involved. This is true at the national and cultural level; allowing only one political body and its favored ideologies to capture space would be an immense danger for anyone it views as an enemy. For the US and its allies to rest on their laurels while (for example) China becomes sole proprietor of humanity's inheritance in the solar system would be a great strategic failure. And a similar principle applies at the corporate level. I have been pleased to see competitors rising to challenge SpaceX, because no matter how much the latter reduces launch costs, it does not necessarily have an incentive to minimize prices without at least one rival to outbid it.
However, I must admit that while these practical motives for opening up space may justify my personal interest, they are not its source. Space exists at the frontier of both our territory and our technology, and the lure of that frontier is ultimately what draws me. It is the lure of novelty: not only going places we have never been, but doing and creating the unprecedented in order to get there. And it is the lure of the Other: a way to reach beyond ourselves and our ordinary lives to discover the awe-inspiring and foreign. For me, space travel is more a matter of the soul than the body ... not merely a tool of survival, but one of those things that help make survival worth the effort. This, I think, is the main benefit the recent Artemis II mission has given the world. It has had no material effect on most spectators' lives (yet), but has offered them inspiration and hope, if only by demonstrating that people can work together to accomplish something stunning. Robotic probes, however useful, do not seem to have quite the same effect. Humans in space help other humans feel connected to the mission.
Experience with other frontiers reveals their unpredictability. Who could have foreseen the applications of the internet when it was nascent? It needed millions of people acting on millions of ideas to make it what it is today. And so, when all has been said, we cannot fully know what people will gain from access to space until we give it to them.
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