“We choose to go to
the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because
they are easy, but because they are hard…”
What was John Fitzgerald
Kennedy really thinking?
That ringing
declaration in support of “Project
Apollo” - now almost a half century
old - is, of course, John Kennedy’s most controversial legacy; a
President faced with unprecedented Earthly challenges at the same time
that he was proposing the 20th Century’s most extraordinary political
and technological undertaking: an actual human journey to the Moon!
If you think you know “why” President Kennedy committed this Nation to
undertake a project so expensive, so unprecedented… so obviously
“irrelevant” to Earthly human needs in a time of major crises… you need
to think again; by the time you finish reading, I guarantee that your
opinion re the urgent relevance of “Apollo” – if not all of NASA – to a
range of current crises, will never be the same.
We forget (those of us who know it happened – to be differentiated from
those among us who find it so unimaginably difficult in retrospect, that
they actually believe it never COULD have happened…) how audacious
Kennedy’s proposal really was, for 1961.
Such things had barely moved
off the funny pages even then, from “Dick Tracy and his Mooncar” to
“Buck Rogers”… and here was a President of the United States proposing
that Americans could - should! - actually “go to the Moon!”
Kennedy’s pressing terrestrial problems involved not only an escalating
Cold War, with an ever more menacing arch-enemy from the 1950’s, the
Soviet Union - which threatened to go “hot” at any moment, ultimately
ending the world in literal nuclear annihilation (and almost did, in
October, 1962) – but equally grave challenges at home:
growing crises of
long-standing racial inequality
chronic unemployment
regional economic
stagnation
lagging educational
opportunities
outright urban
collapse in certain major American cities
and even the basic
inefficiencies of government itself (in its ability – then, as
now - to apparently DO anything about these daunting, growing
issues…)
In accepting his Democratic
Party’s 1960 nomination for the presidency, Kennedy boldly called
his initiatives to confront these major challenges, “The New Frontier”:
“…we stand at the edge
of a New Frontier - the frontier of unfulfilled hopes and dreams. It
will deal with unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered
pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty
and surplus….”
And, just as a palpable
hunger exists now for fundamental “change” - to successfully confront,
after decades of political “gridlock,” our own rising geopolitical and
domestic problems - so Kennedy’s “New Frontier" was his answer to the
equally daunting international and domestic crises of his day, starting
with outcompeting an entire, highly organized international “political
religion” - communism - which threatened to not only physical attack
this Nation with nuclear weapons without warning, but ultimately,
threatened to “seduce and then enslave” billions of impoverished peoples
also seeking new opportunities and hope around the world.
Today, almost all of John Kennedy’s “unattainable political agenda” –
including the banishment of communism - so boldly proposed under the
heading of “The New Frontier,” has been achieved (even as newer, and in
some perceptions, graver problems have arisen…).
At the time however, because of stubborn Republican (and conservative
Democratic) opposition, particularly to strong domestic “change,” John
Kennedy himself did not live to see most of his New Frontier enacted;
the majority of Kennedy’s economic and social reforms were only passed
and implemented by Congress after his assassination… championed by his
own Vice-President and successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson - who
promptly renamed Kennedy’s New Frontier “The Great Society.”
As a young man growing up in
the midst of Kennedy’s heady revolution, who’s family had experienced
first-hand the negative effects of the racial discrimination endemic in
the 1950’s, who himself had to overcome a definite lack of governmental
educational assistance to achieve his own hopes and dreams, it’s
probably no great secret to this audience which program of Kennedy’s
“New Frontier” reached out and touched my life - and, as I will
demonstrate, ultimately the lives of everyone - in a most profound and
unique fashion.
The Space Program
To a kid who discovered “science fiction” at the age of ten, where “the
impossible” was repeatedly just a page turn away, the idea in my early
teens that an actual, elected President of the United States was going
to send human beings to the surface of another world – and “before this
decade is out…” - was unimaginably inspiring.
I mean, what could NOT be
accomplished… if a young President could actually make that happen!?
Who else could then have imagined that, just a few years later, at the
tender age of 23, that man would find himself actually advising “the
most trusted man in America,” Walter Cronkite, and, at the Tiffany
Network, CBS, on John Kennedy’s most far-reaching New Frontier vision –
“Project Apollo” - human beings sent specifically to leave “American
footprints”... on the surface of another world!
In retrospect, the most frustrating experiences I probably had as I
attempted to carry out my “mission” at CBS - advising a major television
network on the science, as well as historical context, of this
extraordinary 20th Century Presidential vision - was the deep cynicism
over, and repeated lack of fundamental comprehension of, “Project
Apollo”… not only among my network colleagues at CBS, but in ALL the
major media covering the Moon landings!
No matter what I said, in
trying to explain the deeper societal and historical implications behind
President Kennedy’s commitment to Apollo (like, his
September 20, 1963
address to the United Nations - where the President publically revealed
for the first time that the United States was considering going to the
Moon with the Russians!), all the producers that I worked with or met,
all the network correspondents… even the veteran “print” reporters, who
had covered space from the beginning… all stubbornly refused to see any
“greater meaning” to what we all were covering; in their minds, stripped
of the superficial glamour of “landing on another planet”…
Kennedy’s Moon Program was
simply the misdirected, almost irrelevant (and VERY expensive…) legacy
of “a Cold War obsessed President.”
In recent years, in a broader policy assessment of Apollo, several
writers have come to somewhat different conclusions: that, Kennedy’s
surprising commitment to an aggressive manned spaceflight program in the
1960’s did lead to some equally surprisingly positive economic and
social impacts on those other, simultaneous domestic challenges at home.
W. Henry Lambright,
Professor of Public Administration and Political Science at Syracuse
University, has written an excellent profile of James E. Webb, Kennedy’s
hand-picked NASA Administrator (and the man directly responsible for
Apollo’s stunning political and technological success) - called
“Powering Apollo.”
In the book, Lambright
describes one of Webb’s own major long-range visions for NASA’s impact
on society, beyond the space program:
“…using universities to
strengthen regional economies and moving the United States toward… a
‘Space Age America’…."
As immediate down payment on
this “regional economic development strategy,” even as Apollo was being
formulated, Webb deliberately placed NASA’s most massive and
heavily-funded facilities in the South - in a thousand-mile-long swath
from Texas, through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, into Florida.
“…under the first NASA
Administrator, T. Keith Glennan, the decision had been made
to contract out most of NASA's work to industry and universities.
Webb continued this pattern, and often pointed out that 90-95
percent of NASA's Apollo work was spent outside government…”
Paraphrasing University of
York sociologist,
Brian Woods’ independent, 2003 analysis of several key
Webb decisions in those early NASA years:
“… indeed, Webb's
leadership (with a bit of help from Lyndon Johnson…) unquestionably
led to the location of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Texas, and
the careful building of this ‘southern crescent’: a political
maneuver which not only assured NASA powerful congressional support
for years to come, but directly infused literally billions of
dollars into depressed economies all across the South, thus
addressing one of Kennedy’s prime targets of domestic economic
policy – ‘southern regional economic stagnation’.
By locating NASA
facilities right across the southern tier, at a time when these
areas were trying to escape from an agricultural based economy and
into the 20th Century, Webb managed to make key members of the
Congress ‘direct stakeholders in Apollo’….”
This deliberate placement of
several major NASA facilities and research centers in the South, also
gave the federal government – armed with non-discriminatory hiring
standards, and a fundamental economic lever – an ability to directly
influence racial discrimination, through enforced hiring practices at
NASA (and among its NASA contractors…), all across this “southern
crescent.”
As part of this collateral, specific, long-range plan for “positive
domestic impact” from the space program, Webb also created the NASA
“Sustaining University Program [SUP]” - which heavily funded research
facilities on campuses during the 1960s across the nation (but, again,
especially in the South), seeking to replenish the national ranks of
scientists and engineers (on which NASA’s own short-term success heavily
depended) through local fellowships and grants. In this way, Webb hoped
someday to harness local colleges and universities to other public goals
and national problem-solving tasks… long after the successful completion
of Apollo.
Much has been said and written about the unquantifiable aspects of
Apollo – the so-called “student inspiration factor.” Needless to say,
I’m a prime example; without John Kennedy’s clear call to “leave this
planet for another world” - if only for a few days - I have no doubt
that my own life would have been significantly different….
Others have also tried to grapple with this intangible… and have failed
to greater or lesser degrees; how can you put a number on the ability of
an idea… an “impossible dream”… to lift a kid above “the mundane,” to
power him or her through life with the realistic hope that they can
accomplish something previously thought “impossible” in their own lives,
by getting a better education, by getting that first job… or, by
literally “reaching for the stars?!”
You can’t.
But, that doesn’t mean you stop trying….
In the early 1990's, two decades after my unique “Apollo/CBS
experience,” I had the privilege of bringing together a team of local
volunteers in the development of a "space-age" education project called
“The Enterprise Mission” - deliberately set amid the mostly minority
population of an inner-city school (Dunbar Senior High, just off Capitol
Hill) in downtown Washington D.C.
The experiment was built
around the concept of "student involvement in real-time mission planning
and data acquisition," during various NASA exploratory missions - such
as "Hubble," and the ill-fated "Mars Observer"; translation – using the
famed “Starship Enterprise” and her multi-racial crew as “the model”
(from my long association and friendship with Gene Roddenberry,
and my advising “Star Trek”), and a direct connection with NASA - we
created at Dunbar the first multi-disciplinary “starship,” to,
“Boldly go where no
students had gone before…!”
Starting as an after school
extracurricular activity, and using donated computers from several
manufacturers across the country as well as official NASA
imaging-enhancement software, "The Enterprise Mission" and "becoming a
crew member of the 'U.S.S. Dunbar'" eventually became an accredited
course in the Dunbar magnet school curriculum.
Over the years, scores of
senior NASA Headquarters and Goddard Space Flight Center
personnel enthusiastically participated in the program, including
installation of a student satellite data link direct to NASA-Goddard,
and on-site briefing of the “student crew” by actual NASA engineers,
management personnel and scientists attached to various on-going NASA
missions.
In 1991, then-NASA Administrator Admiral Richard Truly and
education advocate, First Lady Barbara Bush, both came to Dunbar for
personal briefings by the “crew” of the “USS Dunbar”; in the waning
moments of a world without the Internet, the students took the
initiative to even locate the proper protocols for “piping a Navy
Admiral aboard a starship” - and greeted Admiral Truly (to his
surprise…) with the appropriate full honors….
This remarkable experiment - the original "ENTERPRISE Mission" - was
ultimately nominated for a White House "Point of Light" award for
“outstanding contributions to education.”
Students want to be inspired by their education; in fact, they need to
be.
The simple statistics tell the story: over 7000 students,
nationwide, drop out of school every day; over 1.2 million each year do
not return to graduate with their own peers. The majority readily admit
that the single, overriding reason is, they’re bored.
Our experience in Washington was a real eye-opener in this regard; in an
inner-city school, in a city where the murder rate rocketed in 1991 to
the highest in the Nation, where - when we said goodnight, we couldn’t
help wondering which student might literally be shot in a drive-by
before returning to school the next morning – and in a physical school
building constantly guarded by metal detectors, security guards and
daily hand-gun searches… one thing became overwhelmingly apparent:
The students immediately “got” what we were doing.
As we began, still surrounded by hanging wires and gaping ceiling
panels, we knew we were “on to something” when several members of the
“crew,” totally unasked, showed up on that first weekend, volunteering
to help us literally build our “starship” (converting a former storage
area into the future “Briefing Room of the USS Dunbar”). We were even
more convinced when the kids kept showing up, even during holidays, to
help us finish all the installations.
Then, when we began conducting actual “daily briefings” – after school,
mind you - on “the relationships between the daily school curriculum
(history, science, English…) and various events occurring in the news,
viewed from around the world live on their own NASA satellite dish…” we,
regrettably, had to actually turn some students away!
Conceived before the Internet made most of the things we dreamed up
really practical (like, the ability to look up ANY data “in the ship’s
computer” – i.e. on the Net - during an actual “briefing” ; the ability
to communicate with student “away teams” via live television, literally
a world away; the ability to combine “exercises” taking place on the
“USS Dunbar” with those of other “student crews” on other “starships”...
anywhere on Earth... or, someday, off it!), the experience unmistakably
showed our Dunbar “crew” what the future of education could someday
be...
If “educators” took their heads out of the sand, and decided to listen
to what students have to say about their own, increasingly boring,
irrelevant – and failing - educational institutions!
All confirmed by the emotional letters I’ve received over the years
since, from the Dunbar students themselves… who participated in – and
still remember - our pioneering “voyages.” All affirming that, even in
this first “primitive” incarnation… The Enterprise Mission truly made a
difference in their lives….
The larger lesson here is also blatantly apparent: students need to
dream “big dreams,” they need to see that the future - both their own,
and that of their society… their entire world, in fact – can
realistically be better than today….
And, they need to see how – if properly equipped and motivated - they
too can play a meaningful role in making that future come about… even if
their school is in the middle of a “war zone,” in downtown Washington
DC!
Jeffrey Bennett is also an educator, with a B.A. in Biophysics
from the University of California at San Diego, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in
Astrophysics from the University of Colorado, currently specializing in
mathematics and science education.
Here is Jeff’s independent attempt to quantify this crucial “inspiration
factor”:
“… while inspiration is
generally considered priceless, let's try to put a value on it
anyway, just for the sake of argument. For example, suppose that
building a Moon base as a stepping stone to Mars and beyond provides
only enough inspiration to cause an additional 1% of the U.S.
population to go on to get a college degree.
This is a pretty
conservative assumption, especially when you consider that the
percentage of the U.S. adult population (over age 25) with a 4-year
college degree has already risen from 7.7% in 1960 to about 26%
today. (Yes, I do think much of that can be traced to Apollo, but
that's a different argument.)
Statistical studies of
income show that, over a lifetime, the average college graduate
earns some $1 million more than a high school graduate.
Now run the numbers:
“If an additional 1%
of the U.S. population of 300 million people gets a college
degree, that's 3 million more people earning college graduate
salaries rather than high school graduate salaries. Over their
lifetimes, these people earn an additional $1 million each. The
total economic impact is then 3 million people times $1 million
each, or $3 trillion.
“This $3 trillion return
is roughly 20 times the estimated cost for the Moon base. That's an
investment that's hard to beat, even if the cost has been
underestimated by a factor of 2 or 3 or 4...
“As President Kennedy said in 1961,
‘We choose to go to
the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the
other things, not because they are easy, but because they are
hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the
best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one
that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone,
and one which we intend to win...’
The Moon should never
have been a one-shot deal. It's time to go back and complete a dream
that has been on hold for more than 30 years. The future depends on
it.”
“… the future depends on it….”
For those used to thinking
in such “grand terms,” like President Kennedy (and his best-known
alter-ego and speech writer, Ted Sorenson), it must have been apparent
early on that a call to do something as “encompassing and impossible” as
Apollo, couldn’t help but have much broader, long-term social
consequences.
There is now hard evidence
that this – and NOT a mere “short-term propaganda win” over the Soviet
Union - was what Kennedy actually expected to achieve by championing
Apollo... exactly as I argued to my colleagues in the network all those
years ago!
At our recent
Enterprise Mission Washington DC National Press Club
briefing on “the hidden discoveries and benefits of the space program,”
we revealed White House, State Department and NASA memos
that now prove that my efforts at CBS to explain Kennedy’s ringing call
to send humans to the Moon, as something “far MORE than merely Cold War
competition” were, in fact, correct!
These documents now clearly
demonstrate that - despite all that has been drummed into us for the
last 40 or so years in terms of the glib “Cold War explanation” -
Kennedy’s decision on and surprisingly firm political commitment to
Apollo was NOT driven “primarily by Cold War competition with the
Russians”… but by motivations demonstrably now far, far larger...
The foundation for this new analysis can be found, not surprisingly, in
Kennedy’s own historic address to that Joint Session of Congress, May
25, 1961… if you just seriously look:
“… finally, if we are to
win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom
and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in
recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in
1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere,
who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should
take…
“Now it is time to take longer strides - time for a great new
American enterprise – time for this nation to take a clearly leading
role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to
our future on earth [emphasis added]….”
“… the key to our future on Earth….”
As we further detail in our
New York Times Bestseller, “Dark
Mission: the Secret History of NASA,” these newly-published
documents reveal that, within days of his ringing challenge to the
American people, the Congress and the Soviets in Washington, Kennedy was
actually, urgently, trying to sell Nikita Khrushchev (then head of the
Soviet Union), at their first Summit in Vienna, on the daring idea of
joint US/USSR space exploration programs!
Including... going to the Moon, not in competition… but together!
“…that same August
[1963], Kennedy sent Father a proposal about joining Soviet and
American forces for a flight to the moon. He had first mentioned the
idea in Vienna, in June 1961, but at the time Father hadn’t
replied….”
This, of course, not only
tosses into the ashcan of history all the “real-politic reasons” we’ve
been given for Kennedy engaging in an expensive space race with the
Russians - it raises profound political, diplomatic and economic
questions regarding the President’s real, underlying motivations for
going to the Moon at all!
What was John
Fitzgerald Kennedy really thinking?
Obviously, from this documentation, and despite his repeated public
rhetoric regarding American’s “winning the race to the Moon,” the
President privately thought a joint lunar effort with the USSR was the
only real way to proceed!
Consistent with this
analysis, the documents now reveal that Kennedy tried repeatedly to get
Premier Khrushchev to go along with this radical idea; on the
record, we have at least five attempts by Kennedy, across the three full
years of his aborted Presidency - in secret NSC memos and discussions in
the White House, and in equally clandestine diplomatic efforts with both
Khrushchev, and even meetings with the Washington Ambassador from the
Soviet Union, Anatoly Dobrynin - to quietly convince the Premier
to undertake a joint manned mission to the Moon!
It is clear from these remarkably persistent initiatives, long before
his going public at the United Nations in September 1963, that the
President in fact saw “a combined journey to the Moon” as vastly more
significant and far-reaching than “achieving an American propaganda coup
over the Soviet Union, by going there alone….”
And, in mid-November 1963, according to Sergei Khrushchev’s personal
recollections - after literally years of determined efforts by the
President to convince him to accept this 180-degree reversal of the then
public perception of “an all out race”… Nikita Khrushchev finally did
agree!
“… in the August of
1963, President Kennedy met with the Soviet Ambassador Dobrinyin,
and then he spoke to the United Nations. He offered once more to
join the efforts, and at that time my father was very serious. I
walked with him, sometime in late October or November, and he told
me about all these things. He told me that we have to think about
this and maybe accept this idea…
“He thought also of the political achievement of all these things,
that then they would begin to trust each other much more....”
However, just days later…
John Kennedy was killed.
In 1999, Sergei Khrushchev looked back:
“…the Cold War might
have ended in 1969… an American astronaut and a Soviet cosmonaut
might have stepped onto the moon’s surface together.
“But life turned out differently. In November 1963 John F. Kennedy
died, and a year later, in October 1964, my father was removed from
power. The leaders who replaced Father hurried to 'correct his
mistakes' by giving a new impetus to the arms race and producing
tens of thousands of tactical nuclear weapons. By 1989 the Soviet
army had seven thousand nuclear cannon.
“The Cold War was prolonged by twenty years...”
This indisputable chronology
now makes clear what Kennedy’s “secret agenda” - via a vis Apollo -
really was from the beginning: not only the first, historic manned
mission to the Moon… but a radical “end run” on the decades-long,
hopelessly stalemated international situation vis a vis the Soviet
Union.
An imaginative attempt to
diffuse - if not completely end - the long “Cold War” decades sooner
than it eventually ended; to usher in a new era of unprecedented
cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union, beginning in
space… literally on the surface of another world… but ultimately,
designed to spread around this world.
A radical, imaginative diplomatic effort that ultimately, we now know
succeeded… only to be killed by John Kennedy’s own, untimely death.
For those who have not lived long enough to remember the frightening
nightmares of those years for all us kids - the pointless “duck and
cover” exercises in the middle of the day; the recurring wail of air
raid sirens in “mock Russian bomber drills” in the middle of the night;
the recurring images on TV of “atom bombs blowing entire cities into
smithereens…” - there is no imagining the almost physical lifting of the
burden with the real ending of the Cold War, in 1991.
Or the haunting thought I had, when I first found these extraordinary
documents confirming my deepest-held suspicions of Kennedy’s real
thinking on Apollo, echoing exactly those of Premier Khrushchev’s son:
That - were it not for
the sudden murder of this young President on that Dallas afternoon -
the long, expensive nuclear nightmare of the confrontation between
the United States and the Soviet Union could realistically have
ended a full generation earlier… replaced by “who knows what” - if
Kennedy had also lived to be the architect of that new, unwritten
future!
Which brings us to the hard
reality of today's NASA... and its unique relevance to the unprecedented
global challenges we face in these opening moments of the 21st
Century....
The sad fact is that today’s space agency is NOT the “can-do NASA” that
John Kennedy and James Webb created, to take a hopeful
generation to the Moon “within a decade.”
And, it is certainly not the
NASA that they planned to leave to future generations… to accomplish
even more extraordinary missions, as the President declared at the
United Nations just weeks before he died, “ultimately in service to all
Mankind.”
NASA currently is an aging bureaucratic agency, bogged down with an
equally aging, obsolete technology – the space shuttle; as it is equally
bogged down - in an astonishing display of
sheer engineering
incompetence - in its current efforts even to create a viable successor
to the shuttle, essential for successfully returning humans to the Moon.
And, if this were not enough, NASA is also still embedded in another
dead-end project – named so by none other than the current head of NASA,
Michael Griffin: The International Space Station.
A project that, after taking the lion’s share of the limited agency
resources from NASA’s true mission, exploration, for almost two decades…
will be literally abandoned by NASA in just the next few years!
And then, just this week (at this writing), despite President Bush’s
2004 enunciation of a “new NASA vision” after the Space Station is
completed, major splits have now developed within the agency over
precisely what that specific “new NASA goal” should be… divisions which
threaten to ultimately
abandon future human exploration and development
of the resources of the Moon, to China!
If not headed off, this is a major short-term and long-term American
economic disaster in the making….
NASA currently gives jobs to about
18,000 civil servants, plus about
40,000 additional non-governmental workers through external contracts –
the latter just as Glennan and Webb originally intended. However, this
direct economic impact is only about a tenth that created by NASA
funding at the height of the Apollo program.
Yet, in keeping with trends
established at the beginning of John Kennedy’s “Apollo Vision,” a large
percentage of these current NASA jobs are still located in the South –
from Florida to Texas – and would bring major economic disaster to this
region, and a range of regional institutions - from local government to
schools - if NASA’s current programs, specifically the space shuttle,
the Space Station and the follow-on “Constellation” program to return to
the Moon, were substantially curtailed or altered.
In the longer term….
it can now be seriously argued that, without John
Fitzgerald Kennedy’s extraordinary vision vis a vis “Apollo” – and, at a
pivotal time in American history both domestically and internationally,
the 1960’s – the enormous economic benefits our society reaped later in
the 20th Century (and into the dawning of the 21st ) simply wouldn’t be
here!
All the myriad technologies which make our modern, Internet-connected,
computer-driven civilization possible, starting with the “chips” at the
heart of every electronic gadget we so casually take for granted - from
our cell phones, to the I-Pods, to the prolific home computers and
communications satellites which link all of us together - simply would
not be fueling the heart of the annual thirteen trillion dollar 21st
Century American economy (up from just under a
half trillion dollars in
1960, when Kennedy was elected)… almost half a century after the
inception of Apollo and the revolutionary technologies it spawned.
Jerome E. Schnee,
economist with the Graduate School of Business at Rutgers University,
published a report in 1977 assessing the overall economic impact of
Apollo.
According to Dr. Schnee:
“… NASA's budget totaled
less than 1 percent of the GNP during peak activity years in the
last half of the 1960s. Why then have economists devoted
considerable attention to a governmental program that represents a
negligible proportion of national economic activity? Professional
interest in space program economics is attributable to a growing
awareness of the economic significance of technological change.
Economists define
technological change as an advance in industrial-related knowledge
that permits, and is often embodied in, new methods of production,
new designs for existing products, and entirely new products and
services. Economists view technological changes as one of the most
significant determinants of the shape and direction of the U.S.
economy…
“Analyses of the macroeconomic effects of the U.S. space program
[therefore] attempt to identify and measure that portion of economic
growth attributable to technological progress. A Midwest Research
Institute (MRI) study of the relationship between R&D expenditures
and technology-induced increases in GNP indicated that each dollar
spent on R&D returns an average of slightly over seven dollars in
GNP over an eighteen-year period following the expenditure.
Assuming that NASA's R&D
expenditures produce the same economic payoff as the average R&D
expenditure [some have argued that NASA funding has significantly
more innovative leverage…], MRI concluded that the $25billion (1958)
spent on civilian space R&D during the 1959-69 period [mainly on
Apollo] returned $52 billion through 1970 and will continue to
stimulate benefits through 1987, for a total gain of $181 billion
[emphasis added]….”
The current US economy is
~26 times larger than the one inherited from Dwight
Eisenhower in the 1960s.
If the fundamental NASA R&D
that Kennedy initiated through Project Apollo is not emulated, if bold
new technological initiatives for the next half-century are not carried
out equally successfully - through the invention of the fundamental new
technologies NASA will require, across a broad spectrum of
energy, electronic and environmental needs essential to actually
building any working infrastructure for living on the Moon.
Then, as the studies show,
the larger American economy will inevitably suffer; because again,
according to Jerome Schnee:
“…technological change
exerts a particularly important influence on the national rate of
economic growth... about 90 percent of the long-term increase in
output per capita in the U.S. has been attributable to technological
change, increasing educational achievement, and other factors not
directly associated with increases in the quantity of labor and
capital….”
Shockingly however, current
NASA Administrator,
Michael Griffin, recently admitted that the
share of NASA’s budget specifically devoted to fundamental research and
development of “new space technology” – new energy resources, new
materials, new communications methods, development of fundamentally new
propulsion technologies for transporting Americans more cheaply into
space – from a high of about 10% of NASA’s budget during “the Apollo
Era,” has fallen now to ZERO in the current NASA budget!
And, remember, it is this fundamental R&D which, according to the
economists (above), supports,
“… 90 percent of the
long-term increase in output per capita in the U.S.… [directly]
attributable to technological change.”
The next president of the
United States must reverse this disastrous, short-term policy for NASA –
and return the Agency to its unique historical position… as a force for
investing crucial national resources in a way that are proven, by every
economic indicator, to demonstrably increase the Nation’s wealth… and,
over generations!
The next elected president will be facing major global and domestic
challenges that, in many ways, are far more difficult to successfully
resolve than those which John Kennedy confronted.
These include a steadily
declining dollar; a fundamentally decreasing economic productivity at
home, after decades of continuous economic growth; a looming credit
crisis with major foreign lenders, particularly China; and an ever
increasing dependence on foreign and expensive energy resources –
specifically, Middle Eastern oil.
As we approach the 2008 presidential election, one overwhelming fact
should be born in mind by all the candidates confronting these daunting
problems - regardless of their party, race or gender: real societal
wealth is created by a real increase in any one of only three major
economic drivers: energy… physical resources… information.
John Kennedy’s “Apollo” increased the Nation’s wealth across these ~50
years by significantly increasing one of these “Big Three” – basic
scientific and engineering information, subsequently made available to
American industry at large. The result was the “Internet civilization”
we currently enjoy.
President Bush’s new “Vision for Space Exploration” – by planning a
major return to the Moon, this time to stay – will inevitably require a
dramatic increase in all three prime indicators, and thus will
inevitably increase real wealth back here on Earth even more
dramatically, through vastly expanded access to... more energy, more
resources… and dramatically new scientific information.
In other words, if Apollo (according to the previously cited studies)
“made” the Nation ~8 times richer than it cost… and, through long-term
R&D ~26 times richer overall in the last five decades… then a reasonable
extrapolation of those studies would indicate that returning to the Moon
- with the intention this time to permanently inhabit another planet –
if accelerated, could potentially result in a GDP increase approximately
20 times that initial NASA investment... almost exactly what Jeff
Bennett independently calculated as the national return from
“generational educational inspiration” alone… just from establishing the
first American Moonbase (above)!
But, as with John Kennedy’s grand Apollo vision ~40 years ago, perhaps
the most important legacy we all could see from accelerating our return
to the Moon is what could dramatically happen here on Earth in just the
next few years….
It is testimony to the lack
of current imaginative thinking in Washington, on how to end (not merely
“win”) our current “war on terror” – the so-called “clash of
civilizations” - which presents us once again with the same dismal
prospects that once confronted President Kennedy, for “more unending
nightmares for countless generations of Americans to come….”
Some candidates for
president have even promised during the current campaign:
“There are far more wars
to come…”
What is clearly needed,
then, is some of the imaginative thinking that John Kennedy displayed in
creating a radical new way to peacefully seek an end our own
generation’s “unending, overriding nightmare…”
A proposal that could
realistically bring the West and the vast majority of Islam peacefully
together… in some overarching “common cause, or project”… for the
long-term betterment of both great cultures and the effective isolation
of the tiny group of ultimate fanatics currently driving all the fear.
Perhaps, in seeking the
visionary benefits of such a joint collaboration, we should look
spaceward once again and ask, as John Kennedy once asked:
“…Surely we should
explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries -
indeed of all the world - cannot work together in the conquest of
space, sending someday in this decade to the moon not the
representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all
of our countries….”
Which leaves us with these
still unanswered questions:
Why, despite his public
"Cold War" rhetoric, was John Kennedy so obviously determined
privately to send young astronauts and cosmonauts jointly to the
Moon!? What, in his mind, could have been waiting there… which might
have the power to unify a world? And why, after years of stubbornly
declining, was Premier Khrushchev suddenly persuaded to agree…?
The answers - when we do
return - may surprise and save us all..., a New Frontier… of Hope.
