There has always been a note of nationalism to space exploration. We went to the moon “because it was hard”, as Kennedy said – but we also went because the Russians already had people in orbit around Earth. Every time a NASA spacecraft visits another world, the . NASA administrator Charles Bolden has justified the agency’s bid to create crewed craft for future missions as a way to ““.
We may now be seeing the logical conclusion of that focus. Former space shuttle commander Eileen Collins on the night of 20 July – the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing – to call for “leadership that will make America’s space programme first again”. This is a clear reframing of Donald Trump’s intensely nationalistic “Make America Great Again” theme.
This is a step too far. The space community and the science community more broadly should not be co-opted in service of a political candidate who has called climate change a Chinese hoax. It’s time to reassess what we value in space. The best, most exciting, work has been done as part of international efforts; going it alone will not teach us more about the universe.
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It makes sense for nations to take pride in their space exploits. They capture imaginations like little else does, and inspire people to do great things. “Space is the better angels of our nature made manifest,” says of the Planetary Society, a non-profit group that promotes space exploration.
The US isn’t the only country to wave its little flags at every launch and landing. When the Indian space agency successfully placed a spacecraft in orbit around Mars in 2014, India’s media ran ecstatic headlines like “The first Asian country to reach Mars“. This year the UK took national pride in British astronaut Tim Peake. China, Iran and North Korea all speak of their space programmes as emblems of their position on the world stage.
Pride, fear and control
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that – it’s like being excited when your sports team wins. But pride can easily turn from pro-us to anti-them.
“Leaders can take that pride and meld it into anything they want,” says Duane Hyland, who has studied of the 1960s. “For good or for bad.”
Fear and control have been a part of space rhetoric from the beginning, too. Lyndon Johnson declared that “Control of space means control of the world.”
Before Kennedy even made his famous moon-shot speech, US military officials were talking about the – the “ultimate high ground”. And Johnson defended the Apollo programme after Kennedy’s assassination, saying, “I do not believe that this generation of Americans is willing to resign itself to going to bed each night by the light of a communist moon.”
Collins echoed these sentiments in her speech on Wednesday: “Nations that lead on the frontier lead in the world.” And the spectre of China – which has been making steady, methodical progress in space exploration – regularly crops up during Congressional hearings about space exploration as a threat to US dominance.
Do we really want to return to this? Since the cold war, successes in space have gone from just keeping people alive there to understanding what it is and our place in it. Human space flight was and is mostly about flexing national muscle, not about science.
That’s the sort of space exploration we can expect from a Trump presidency: one that lets science take a back seat. Trump has styled himself as a pragmatist, and has said that he would prioritise fixing potholes over space exploration. Let’s not kid ourselves that his apparent reversal now means that a Trump administration would send spacecraft to Pluto.
The “me-first” framing also limits what we can actually do in space. Collaboration makes projects more , not to mention affordable. It has kept astronauts alive on the International Space Station for upwards of a year at a time, and helped find the missing piece of the standard model of particle physics at the Large Hadron Collider. We don’t need another space race.
Our stated goals for the future of space exploration, both crewed and scientific, are huge: send people to Mars; see the first stars in the universe; explore other worlds to see whether they have life. Maybe nations can take the first steps towards these goals alone, but only an international effort will create the sort of space programme that we need to attain them.
The plaque Neil Armstrong left on the moon reads: “We came in peace for all mankind.” Let’s not let that be mere rhetoric.
