An investment with infinite returns

The answer to the question of whether we should spend on a space programme is yes, and we should consider spending even more

In 1961, science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke wrote a short story called “Death and the Senator”. The plot is simple: A very influential American senator and presidential hopeful is suffering from a disease that will soon kill him. The only treatment involves placing him in zero-gravity at a medical facility on a space station.

Nasa, however, does not have a space hospital because the Senator presided over a committee which cut NASA budgets and refused to allocate funds needed to set up a zero-gravity research hospital. The Soviets, who do have such a facility, offer to treat him. But, of course, that would be political suicide for a right-wing hawk.

Clarke wasn’t just an imaginative writer of science fiction. During World War II, he worked on radar systems for the Royal Air Force, and his first published work was a paper that laid out a plan for a geostationary satellite network that would enable global communications. That 1945 paper, “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?” conceptualised bouncing radio signals off geostationary satellites to send radio signals around the Earth’s curvature.

Eight decades later, we bounce radio, television and telecom signals off satellites as a matter of course. Global communications and entertainment depends totally on satellites. This is merely one of the many, many ways in which aerospace science directly and positively impacts billions.

Weather prediction and hurricane warnings are also a direct payoff from the space presence. Solar power systems were also first developed for space. Telemedicine and its tools were built to enable doctors sitting on the ground to track the health of astronauts in space. The equipment in a modern gym was initially designed for use in space.

Urban water supply and sewage systems use recycling methods developed for human waste recycling in space. The same applies to plumbing in airliners and trains. Ditto for air filtration systems to capture and clean up carbon dioxide. The geolocational technologies we use in our cars, and the mapping tools that help line up power lines, align road designs, and track the number of buildings in a city, were also developed for space and rely on satellites.

Other cutting-edge technologies like robotics, autonomous vehicles, laser power, computing hardware and software, exotic alloys, and ceramics that provide heat and radiation shielding, were all developed to enable space exploration. Space has contributed hundreds of other off-the-shelf technologies, which we use on a daily basis.

Nasa releases an annual update on its patents and it licences those patents out to private industry. There are thousands of these patents. Since Nasa also tenders out for its components and systems, those technologies and patents are quickly adapted for commercial civilian use.

It is impossible to estimate how much space exploration and the technologies developed for it has given back, just as it’s impossible to gauge how much the printing press or the internal combustion engine has contributed to our evolution. There have been mega-multiple returns on investments in space exploration. It is no exaggeration to say that 21st century civilisation would be impossible without space programmes.

This is quite apart from huge advances in basic sciences from investigating strange environments and the likely payoffs from those in future. Our understanding of atmospheres on the Moon, Mars, and Venus are helping us deal better with climate change. An ability to prevent meteorite strikes that cause mass extinctions is also on the agenda. Since this has happened at least twice in Earth’s geological history, it isn’t fear-mongering. There is also the not-so-distant promise that space mining could create new trillion dollar industries in the future.

All this is well-known and none of it is disputed. However, every time a space mission catches the public eye, someone or the other (often many somebodies) asks some version of the illiterate question that has been answered so many times: Why do we (“we” being anyone with a space programme) spend money on space? The fitting retort would be that we should spend even more, given the massive return on investment space exploration has yielded and what it promises to give in future.