which will challenge men's ingenuity and add to their lmowledge for. generations, for centuries, to come. If setting up a missile base on the moon appears to be a bit chimerical for the present, it is by no means farfetched to plan soon on sending scientific instruments there in order to make many, many measurements and observations. Instrumented flights to Venus and Mars are also in sight. Someday, too, we will wish to make measurements beyond the capacity of automatic instruments, and then we may want to send trained scientists and engineers along to supplement the instruments and make them much more effective.
I, for one, believe it is worth a billion dollars a year to develop these scientific projects. A great opportunity for the extension of man's knowledge has come to our generation. I hope we can exploit it fully.
Neverthless, when the congressman or the average citizen asks about space projects and about the Russians being "ahead of us," he does not ask whether the U.S.S.R. has obtained more scientific information in space than the US. The answer would be "no." The U.S. is ahead in the scientific field. But the citizen knows that the heaviest Soviet space vehicle weighed 3,245 pounds, and the heaviest U.S. vehicle only 1700 pounds. Q.E.D.—the Russians are ahead of us. No one asks what was in the Russian vehicle, or whether the US. vehicle might have obtained more or better information. Actually, the Soviets have done some fine experiments, but the US. has achieved more knowledge. That doesn't count, apparently. The Soviet payload weighed twice as much as ours.
III. PSYCHOLOGICAL VALUE
Clearly, then, the "space race" or the "space lag" is based not on military or scientific values, but only on poundage. "The bigger, the better," is a good old American adage—and that is the one we are applying today. Pound for pound, shot for shot, we must catch up with and surpass the Russians. Our good old competitive spirit has been aroused. We must have the biggest cars, the tallest buildings, the largest cities, the fastest runners, the highest jumpers, and the biggest rockets.
Well, I agree! I think we should too, especially rockets—for the whole world is interested in space, and I hate to see us outclassed. But let's be honest about it. It is just a game—a big and serious game, no doubt, but a contest for psychological prestige, I am not going to get hysterical if it takes us a couple of years to get the bigger rockets and bigger space vehicles. We all want to improve the U.S. psychological and political stature in the world. It is probably worth one or two billion dollars a year to achieve this—especially if the rockets are designed to perform valuable > scientific explorations too. What is called for is clearly an energetic, well-planned, intensive effort aimed at clearly worthwhile goals and not just stunts.
IV. THE FUTURE
If we do this, what goals can we expect to achieve in the next 50 years—by the year 2010?
First, we shall see many sizable satellites circling the earth taking weather and other observations; serving as communication relays; collecting data on solar radiation, cosmic rays, magnetic storms, and many other phenomena still not yet discovered. I hope, too, that an astronomical telescope in an earth satellite will have come into being. This is not an easy. project, but astronomy would move ahead by leaps and bounds once observations could be made above the atmosphere.
Instrumented and manned landings on the moon will have been made by 2010 A.D., and much data on lunar conditions and structure will have been accumulated. I cannot predict what will be discovered (if I could, we would not have to go!) but my guess is that the moon's surface will be found far too unfriendly for continuous human habitation, and any notion of an earth colony on the moon will still—in 2010 AD.—seem to lie far in the future. The lack of water and oxygen will be the two critical deficiencies, I suspect. Hauling drinking water up from the earth would be a bit expensive. And, though some say that water will be found in the moon's rocks, we have no information on this question.
But even if lunar conditions do not make a self-sustaining moon colony a feasible enterprise, there will be many scientific expeditions achieved, and much information will be gathered.
In a recent TV panel discussion, a well-known English economist predicted that someday the world's excess population would be shipped out into space to live. To live! Since, in a few years, excess population will be piling up at the rate of 30,000,000 per year (100,000 per day) it appears that we had better start preparing for quite a passenger business into space. If we could start colonizing the moon, it would take only 20 years (at 30,000,000 per year, plus their own babies) before the moon would be as densely populated as the earth. Then Mars? Well, Mars could hear the traffic for 50 years or so. It has only one-quarter the area of the earth, but it is all land. Shall we then go to Venus? Maybe, but then we are through! Possibly other stars have planets, but the nearest of them would take a thousand years or more to get to, in order to find out. And how do we know that the 20th generation born on that flight will remember to come back and tell us about it? I suggest we try to solve our population problems on earth, and not depend on space.
But the exploration of space offers so many important opportunities and possibilities that it will pay us to pursue an energetic program of space research. It will take some time, at best. It will take quite a lot of money. But the dividends—even the financial dividends—may eventually be very great.
