Space Exploration Escalation
What if the Sputnik Crisis had been followed by an Apollo Crisis?
In a post on Centauri Dreams, Bound in Shallows: Space Exploration and Institutional Drift, I discussed the Cold War politics of the Space Race, and how, once the US had landed on the moon with the Apollo Program, the Space Race was perceived as having been “won” and attention (and funding) moved elsewhere to other theaters of superpower competition:
“The Space Race was a superpower competition by proxy, and was not about achieving a spacefaring inflection point, although the two seemed to coincide for a time. Instead of (or, perhaps I should say, in addition to) fighting each other on proxy battlefields of the Cold War, the US and the USSR fought for supremacy in space: ‘The US and USSR utilized the space fight and planetary exploration programs as an assertion of superiority. What made this conflict extraordinary was the fact that it was a nonviolent war.’ While prominent intellectuals like Bertrand Russell expressed their contempt for the superpower competition aspect of space exploration, there is an important sense in which the Space Race represented the best of humanity, when our destructive drive for warfare was sublimated into achievements in science, technology, and engineering.”
We should learn to appreciate the Space Race as a unique event in human history, like the brief flourishing of Athenian democracy before Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War and the subsequent loss of democratic institutions to planetary history for more than two thousand years. We can hope that it is not another two thousand years before a vigorous program of space exploration re-appears in human history, but, if we are to be honest with ourselves, we must acknowledge the possibility that the present Stagnant Era of space exploration could stretch from fifty years to a hundred years, and to a thousand or even to two thousand years. Civilization unfolds on time scales of this magnitude, and we would do well to remember that stagnation is the rule rather than the exception.
The entire planet had an interest in superpower competition that took a constructive, rather than a destructive form, but this apparently was not obvious at the time. Contemporaneous intellectuals, trying to sound serious-minded, harrumphed over the money spent on space exploration that could have been spent on alleviating poverty and suffering on Earth — but, of course, if the money hadn’t been spent on space, it would have been spent on war and war materiel. In fact, from the end of the Apollo Program to the end of the Cold War, the arms race and proxy wars in third world nation-states consumed an enormous quantity of resources destructively, to the detriment of us all.
If there had been the understanding at the time that the the surplus value of these two enormous and technologically advanced nation-states were going to be spent on Cold War competition one way or another, and that it was better that these monies be spent on constructive competition rather than destructive competition, subsequent history might have been different. We might have achieved an early spacefaring breakout as an epiphenomenal expression of the Cold War.
There were some at the time who perceived this as a possibility. Immediately before the US landed astronauts on the moon, the following reflections were written:
“Now whether the Russians will redouble their efforts in getting men on the moon, or restructure their program objectives in other directions, is harder to judge with certainty. It depends on how important a lunar landing is to their plans. More fundamental is whether they are serious about developing a broad capability to use space. It seems hard to disavow a serious long-term commitment after all that has been said over many years by Soviet authorities. It also would seem hard to hold a different view if a new, very large Soviet vehicle is flown. The hardware associated with large vehicles represents such huge, decade-long investments of time, talent, and resources that it is hardly likely to be abandoned without realizing something on that investment.”
…and…
“As far as the United States is concerned, a Soviet manned landing on the moon within the next two or three years may be of less importance than the fact the Soviet Union pursues space flight on a broad front ranging from science and military uses in near Earth space to probes sent to the planets. With or without the intermediate step of a manned landing on the moon (and there is much to commend such practice missions whatever the value of the moon itself), the Soviet Union probably is building toward a wider manned capability for the rest of this century. A permanent manned station in Earth orbit of expanding versatility, leading to an orbital assembly, test, and launch facility for deep space manned flight could in a generation be of greater significance to the relative positions of the great powers than the immediate reaction to the historic first manned landing on the moon, as proud as such an achievement maybe.”
Both of these quotes are from “An American ‘Sputnik’ for the Russians?” by Charles S. Sheldon II, included in the volume Men in Space: The Impact on Science, Technology, and International Cooperation (1970), edited Eugene Rabinowitch and Richard S. Lewis, along with several other highly suggestive from the same era. By the time this volume was published the US had landed on the moon, but the consequences of this achievement, and the responses by the US and the USSR, were not yet evident.
We can easily imagine a tit-for-tat strategy in space exploration that spiraled into a escalation, with the US going to the moon, the USSR responding by going to Mars (redoubling their efforts, as Sheldon put it), and the US responding to this “provocation” by going to the asteroid belt. In this context of superpower competition, “flags and footprints” missions would have profound consequences; each time the flag of one of the competitors is placed on some body in space, the other side would feel compelled to place its flag on the same body, or on some further body. In this way, the entirety of the solar system might well have been visited within a few decades of the moon landing. Instead, we got Apollo-Soyuz, detente in space, and a Stagnant Era in space exploration that has endured from that time to the present day.
Rarely do we understand ourselves. Just as we failed to understand and appreciate the great achievement of a non-violent war between superpowers, we have also failed to understand the economic and technological basis that made this great achievement possible. In Five Ways to Think about Civilization I argued that agricultural civilizations were aware that the wealth of their society, in so far as they possessed any wealth, derived from agricultural production, and social institutions were centered on agricultural production:
“For all the faults and failings of agrarian civilizations, there is a sense in which the self-awareness of agrarian civilizations exceeded the self-awareness of industrialized civilizations. Almost all agrarian civilizations were rigidly hierarchical and stratified, but from the bottom to the top of the feudal hierarchy of agrarian civilizations everyone understood that agriculture was the source of the wealth and productivity of their society.”
This stands in contrast to the widespread ignorance in industrialized civilization that our wealth is derived from science, which is the engine that drives industrialized civilization forward. Our failure to reflexively understand the source of our wealth and productivity explains how science spending is so easily neglected and seen as a special interest contending for funding with other more pressing interests.
And this is understandable in so far as, if the harvest failed in an agricultural civilization, everyone in a given geographical region might starve, so that the connection between life and wealth was immediate, whereas if an industrialized nation-state fails to spend money on science and education, it may be years or decades before that nation-state falls behind in industrial production, and the connection between spending on science and industrial productivity will be overlooked or even explicitly denied by many.
During that great effort that constituted the Space Race, people from all walks of life, and even people from all over the world, could feel that they were part of a great human adventure. That was a rare moment, perhaps a unique moment, of unity in appreciation and admiration for a technical achievement across the industrialized world and beyond. But this rare moment could not be sustained beyond the moment.
Space exploration is, in a sense, the apotheosis of science and industrial technology — the furthest reach, if you will, of what human beings have accomplished and can accomplish. As such, it is also a vulnerable symbol of that same technical order, and even easier to divest and marginalize than more conventional spending on science and education. Space exploration is an outlier of industrialized civilization, its most complex and even its most noble expression, but precisely because it is a noble expression of a socioeconomic regime otherwise not notable for its nobility, its achievements are historically fragile, and that fragility of achievement explains (at least in part) the Stagnant Era.
