In Space, No One Can Hear the Deficit

Imagine that you're watching a commercial on television. It's one of those touchy-feely public service messages, something about equal opportunity. So there's some sort of teacher, talking to little kids at school. "What do you want to do when you grow up?" she asks. The best answer is, "I wanna be an astronaut!"

Americans have an overactive fascination with outer space. Ask yourself what was more important in the 1960s, Kennedy's assassination or Neil Armstrong's "giant leap"?

It's a difficult question. For years, the space race garnered attention because of its novelty and its political implications. But now, as we send more money than ever to NASA and its surrogates, it's time to cut back.

Our country needs money now more than ever. That's why we cut the Strategic Defense Initiative, and that's why we should cut some of the tens of billions of dollars allocated to the space program.

Space is permanent. Waiting a few years to explore it will not change what we find there. Cutting ongoing research programs could have negative long-term effects on the space program, but balancing the budget is more pressing than exploring the surface of Venus.

The debate about the space program recently entered the domestic political spotlight.

Members of Congress found themselves forced to choose between billion-dollar programs: the Texas atomic super-collider and the still unbuilt space station. The space station won out, not because it carried with it a huge wave of new jobs. The uncontrollable irresistibility of space exploration won the day.

The space race used to be of tremendous political importance--Sputnik and Apollo 11 sent shockwaves through the whole world in 1957 and 1969. Now, however, the former Soviet Union cannot afford to pursue the space race.

Like the arms race, the space race has dissolved because of Russia's monetary dependence and willingness to cooperate with the West.

What competition there is comes from space symposia in Europe, Canada and Japan. In case the federal government hasn't noticed, these people are our friends.

Cooperation with scientists from other nations would allow the U.S. space program to continue at its current pace while cutting our own budget a bit.

Even if the pace of space research is slowed somewhat, who will be hurt? Some would argue that we need to find other celestial bodies to populate when our own Earth becomes unhabitable. It's probably safe to hold off on those particular plans for a few years yet.

Others fear giant comets careening into our planet while we're not looking. The chances of that are slim enough, but predictions of such events can be made from earth. Moreover, there's not much anyone could do about it once warned.

The chronic spending on space does not end with NASA. Another billion-dollar program is SETI--the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. No personal pork-barrelling by a backwoods congressional representative could ever have been as superfluous and ridiculous as this program.

To spend a billion dollars sending radio waves into outer space, in the hope that someone, somewhere in this universe of trillions of planets, has also invented a radio apparatus is completely ludicrous.

Some academics, including Harvard's own Professor Stephen J. Gould, contend that it's worth putting a nickel into the SETI slot machine even if the odds are immense. There might be a huge payoff, but this is a billion dollar-nickel in times when the nation can least afford it.

No one in their right mind would deny funding to Head Start and Medicare to take a one-in-trillions chance, would they? Your government and trusted academics would, clearly.

The most recent, horrendous development in this ongoing love affair is the introduction of "space-ads."

Giant streaks of reflected solar light, haunting our lives with phrases like "Still going..." until we pull down the shades at night. Even in the pristine Colorado Rockies, ten thousand feet above sea level and far from civilization, you would see the ominous grunt, "Uh-huh."

The free market is on the verge of going too far.

Americans must ask themselves which parts of the space program affect them most. Is it the occasional space-walk to repair the malfunctioning mechanical arm, or is it the film of Joe Astronaut playing with the tax-payers' little, magnetic, space-marbles?

The space program must be trimmed of its flashy, exorbitant novelties and left only with affordable, bare-bones science. Perhaps we don't really need a large, expensive, decade-late space station.

We could buy some time on the Soviet-made Mir space station, a relic of the once-flourishing program in the USSR. Unmanned probes appear to be the cheaper, better way to go for scientific data-collecting. In any case, we will always have plenty of time to absorb the budgetary blow. That is, until the sun explodes.

Daniel Altman often wishes on stars.

The space program must be trimmed of its flashy exorbitant novelties and left only with affordable barebones science. Perhaps we really don't need a space station.