Advocates for Space Should be Advocates for Justice on Earth
The SpaceX Falcon 9 lifts Crew Dragon into orbit on May 30th. On the 31st, the spacecraft docked at the International Space Station’s Harmony Port. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky.
A surreal scene played out on CNN just days after the horrific murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. With American cities in flames, lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson started to explain how the police historically upheld white supremacy in the United States. Yet after a few moments, host Fareed Zakaria abruptly spoke up. His once somber voice suddenly enthusiastic, Zakaria cut to the International Space Station, where the Crew Dragon spacecraft was about to dock. After a barrage of technical jargon, the spacecraft attached itself to the station’s Harmony port. “Now there might seem a contrast between what is going on in space and what is going on in America,” Zakaria acknowledged, but the Moon landings had also coincided with civil unrest. “Maybe the lesson is that we can be divided on Earth but united in space as human beings.”
It is a comforting message, and one that will sound familiar to many space enthusiasts. After all, most of us like to pretend that space exploration is apolitical. Perhaps you think that it promises answers to questions we all ask, or that it will unlock a future we all crave. What could be less controversial than that?
Yet if Zakaria’s lesson is truly what we take from this memorable summer, then it is precisely the wrong one. Think of it this way: of the 566 people who have been to space (as of April 9th 2020), exactly 14 – that is, 2.5% – have been Black. Some 65 – a whopping 11%! – have been women. Three – just over 0.5% – have been Black women. Many space agencies are more diverse than they once were. Still it is clear that we have taken our divisions with us beyond the atmosphere.
What we must learn from this moment, as advocates for space exploration, is that human expansion into outer space is not only impossible but immoral unless it is accompanied by a concerted push for justice on Earth. That includes equal treatment for everyone – regardless of race, sex, or sexual identity – and it includes sustainable environmental conservation. Progress beyond Earth demands progress on Earth – and not only because it is the right thing to do.
To explain why, the 1960s do have much to tell us. Although many Americans still imagine that their entire country rallied behind the effort to send men to the Moon, nothing could be further from the truth. Deep social divisions in the country reinforced popular doubts about the usefulness of the Apollo program: doubts that fractured the federal government and extended even into NASA. And when the Apollo astronauts finally reached the Moon, a pandemic swept across the country and killed perhaps 100,000 Americans, primarily the elderly. It was a bruised and battered nation that won the Space Race – a nation very similar to our own, today.
As space advocates no doubt remember, NASA funding in the 1960s briefly accounted for more than 4% of America’s annual federal budget. But soon NASA’s share of that budget came crashing back down to Earth. By 1969, during the first Moon landing, it was just 2.3%; by 1972, amid the last landing, just 1.5%; now it hovers at just under 0.5%. For history buffs, some reasons for the decline – and the sudden cancellation of the lunar program – no doubt seem obvious. The Space Race had been won – the Soviets were not even trying to land on the Moon anymore. The Vietnam War demanded ever more money. A “war on poverty” required money, too. And visiting what then seemed like a barren rock – the Moon – quickly lost its glamor.
But as environmental historian Neil Maher has shown, NASA and its lunar ambitions also lost momentum because, by the closing years of the 1960s, they seemed out of step with emerging or maturing social movements animated by civil rights, second-wave feminism, resistance to the Vietnam War, and environmentalism. Money spent on space, it seemed, was wasted when the more pressing problems of racism, sexism, war, and pollution continued to ravage American cities. Together, the social movements of the era eroded public and political support for space exploration, until those towering Saturn V rockets seemed, to millions, like little more than gleaming symbols of America’s misplaced priorities. “I can't pay no doctor bill,” Gil Scott-Heron famously sang, “but Whitey’s on the moon.”
Demonstrators, led by pastor Ralph Abernathy, protest at the gates to the Kennedy Space Center on the eve of the Apollo 11 mission. Associated Press.
We now know that NASA was full of hidden figures during the Apollo program: women and people of color who played essential, but until recently overlooked, roles in sending astronauts to the Moon. Many have argued, convincingly, that NASA’s lunar program really did have transformative impacts on Earth. But imagine if NASA’s leaders had truly placed the agency in the vanguard of long-overdue change in the 1960s? If the space agency, with its vast influence, had been a genuine force for social justice and sustainability on Earth? Nixon may have been hostile to NASA’s ambitions, but it is easy to imagine a very different trajectory for the agency in the dispiriting decade of the 1970s.
The Space Race reminds us, therefore, that expensive investments in space cannot be sustained if they seem separate from the most pressing needs on Earth – and those needs inevitably include justice and equality for all. Yet space exploration has deeper lessons to impart than that. When we leave our planet, after all, we do what no multicellular Earthling has ever done. We endure an almost unimaginably deadly place, and we travel at almost inconceivable speed, across unfathomable distances. We see what was, for countless generations, hidden in plain sight: worlds and wonders that teach us lessons so deep and true that they might as well constitute divine revelation.
Beginning with Konstantin Tsiolkovksy in 1899, writer after writer has compared leaving the Earth to leaving the womb, perhaps the cradle. It is a tired and inaccurate metaphor – most of us are and will still be here, and quite happy about it. But crossing the veil between Earth and space does at least offer an opportunity for rebirth and reinvention – if not for our species, then for the social and political systems we carry with us from the past.
Perhaps we squandered that opportunity almost before we were aware of it. The first satellites, after all, served first and foremost to intimidate millions in rival superpowers. Still we have only barely begun to reach beyond Earth’s immediate vicinity. When the time comes, we should struggle and strive to be worthy of going further. If we cannot take care of everyone, equally, on one planet – and if we cannot take care of that planet – then we do not belong on another.
This year, NASA published an updated version of Voyager’s last look at its home. “Pale Blue Dot Revisited,” NASA 2020.
Fortunately, traveling through space itself may encourage us to think differently about our lives on Earth. It was, after all, Carl Sagan who encouraged NASA to use Voyager 1 for a parting shot of Earth, from a truly cosmic vantage point in the outer solar system. Famously, in 1990 that picture showed Earth as nothing more than a pale blue dot – a mere “mote suspended on a sunbeam,” as Sagan put it with inimitable eloquence.
“Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner,” Sagan wrote, “how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.” How absurd – how utterly pointless – it all seemed from four billion miles away. The mote that was Earth, Sagan concluded, “underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
Indeed. Those of us who advocate for a human future in space should fight with equal passion for a just and sustainable society on Earth. Otherwise, we miss what may be the most important lesson that this moment – and indeed this universe – has to teach us.
Dr. Dagomar Degroot is an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. His first book, The Frigid Golden Age, explains how a society endured the cooling climate of the Little Ice Age. It was named by the Financial Times as one of the ten best history books of 2018. His next book, Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean, considers how changes in space environments changed history on Earth.