The South Carolina primary brought no surprises, and everything I wrote last month in the aftermath of Iowa still holds true. So instead, here’s a post about space! If you’d like more posts like this, let me know in the comments.
Last week, an American spacecraft landed on the Moon for the first time in 50 years. The craft, called Odysseus, is part of a new NASA program which pays private companies to take scientific instruments to the Moon. Outsourcing payload delivery to the private sector has dramatically reduced the cost of getting equipment to the Moon, and NASA hopes that the same thing will prove to be true of people. As part of its Artemis missions, NASA plans to return people to the Moon later this decade. The ultimate goal is to establish a permanent presence there, with astronauts cycling in and out every few months and carrying out a range of research on the lunar environment and the effects that space has on living beings. With this knowledge, they hope to send human beings to Mars, and eventually beyond.
On one level, I think this is great. Putting a human being on Mars would be genuinely exciting, and it’s great that NASA is working with the private sector to explore space in a way that is acceptable to taxpayers. At its height of the Apollo program, NASA was employing hundreds of thousands of people and consuming about 4% of the federal budget. There’s clearly not the appetite for that level of effort today. But there is still a lot of genuinely interesting science to be done in space, and I’m happy NASA found a way to get it underway again.
On another level, though, I think it’s very revealing that virtually nobody is extremely excited about returning to the Moon. Apollo and “the Space Age” of the 1960s now seem more retro than cutting-edge. While no doubt a technical marvel given its low cost, Odysseus didn’t even manage to land smoothly and is now tilted on its side. The fact that putting a small lander on the Moon is still such a huge technical challenge reveals, if anything, how little humankind has achieved in this realm since the advent of the Space Age.
In the 1960s, the atmosphere was completely different. Neil Armstrong’s small step for mankind was understood as just the beginning of an exciting process which would see humankind quickly explore the solar system, harness its resources for terrestrial use, and then jet onwards to the stars. The original Star Trek captured these hopes well, but it now seems campy and outdated. Armstrong’s visit to the Moon turned out to be the high point rather than just the beginning, as the concrete payoffs of space exploration seemed meager and public interest waned. Having seen that happen once, it’s hard to get into the same excited spirit again. Putting a human back on the Moon or even on Mars is certainly cool - but is it really going to change anything down here on Earth?
I write this not as a space skeptic but as a dedicated space buff. I read an embarrassing amount of science fiction - something like 15 to 20 novels a year - and taught my daughter rudimentary facts about the planets as soon as she could talk (“it’s ouchie hot!” she said of Venus). And the fact is that there are things happening in space that excite me right now - they just have nothing to do with going places in our solar system.
Instead, they’re being done by telescopes - specifically, the James Webb Space Telescope, which since January 2022 has been in a stable orbit at a so-called “Lagrange point” at which the gravity of the Earth and the Sun cancel each other out. From there, Webb has beamed back thousands of images which are spectacular to behold. They have also challenged many of the things that we thought we knew about the universe, such as demonstrating that galaxies formed far sooner after the Big Bang than was previously thought possible.
More tantalizingly, Webb can also analyze the atmospheres of exoplanets - planets warmed by the light of suns other than our own. Not that long ago there was a fierce debate over whether exoplanets even existed, with some scientists saying that our own solar system was just some kind of rocky and gassy freak of nature. The first exoplanet was only detected in 1992; as of this month, we’ve detected about 5,500. And in some cases, Webb can actually tell us what gases these exoplanets have in their atmosphere - meaning that it can look for tell-tale signs of life.
The presence of a large amount of oxygen in an exoplanet atmosphere, for instance, would be strongly indicative of life. Oxygen is released by few non-biological processes, and it tends to dissipate rapidly if not replenished. The oxygen in our atmosphere is only there because it has been released by plants and bacteria over a period of billions of years. If we found an exoplanet with an Earth-like atmosphere - heavy on the oxygen, plus a dash of methane - it would be difficult to explain without invoking life.
Such a finding would be momentous, but it would still be tinged with the uncertainty and sadness of the late Space Age. Interstellar distances are so great that we would have little hope of ever visiting the exoplanet in question. We likely couldn’t even know for sure if what we were looking at was really evidence of life - and if it was, whether that life was a single-celled organism or a planet-spanning civilization. Some of us, though, would choose to believe. And for those who did, it would change the way they looked at themselves and the world forever - far more so than anything we might find on the Moon or Mars.