Thomas O. Paine

Thomas O. Paine, 64, headed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration when it placed the first man on the moon in 1969. After overseeing seven Apollo missions, he served as president of Northrop Corp. for six years. A year ago, President Reagan appointed him chairman of a commission charged with outlining the future of U.S. space exploration. A new report by the National Commission on Space advocates aggressive civilian pioneering in the 21st Century Q: What do you envision as the future of manned space travel? A: The commission would like to see astronauts operating back on the lunar surface by the year 2005, and an initial landing on Mars no later than 2015. In each case there will be heavy emphasis on using materials found on the surface, as opposed to bringing everything over on a big space bridge from Earth. As the century rolls on and more people arrive, the outpost that grew into a base will have become a community. By 2035 it probably won’t make sense for a female astronomer to go all the way back to Earth to have a baby. Q: How would this scenario be accomplished? A: Up until now the space program has been astronautics technology--namely, putting together rocket vehicles that can take people to the moon and bring them back. What we’ve got to add now is biospheric technology, which means the ability to put together an artificial biological system that is completely self-contained--one in which energy and the waste products from astronauts are recycled into plants and trees that take up the CO2. Creating a self-perpetuating food chain is a formidable task, but it is now being tackled for the first time. If people are able to live off the land when they get to the moon, existing on Mars will be easier because it has so much water and carbon. The third essential technology is one that supports the other two. Clearly, you can’t have lots of human laborers. Work will have to be done with robotics. By taking the lead in these three technologies, the United States can move out to the frontier of space. Once there are self-sustaining bases on the moon and Mars, we’ll also have access to nearby asteroids, which have all the raw materials you need. Q: Many people are confused about the structure of the U.S. space program. Should decision-making rest with civilian contractors or with the government? A: Our goal should be to get private industry investing more heavily in space. We recommend in this report, for example, turning over space transportation to private industry. Instead of the government building the next-generation launch vehicle and then paying service companies to operate it, NASA should just purchase transportation. The historic analogy would be U.S. airmail of the 1930s, when government contracts not only got the mail delivered but also made possible the civilian airline industry in this country. NASA should use its engineers and wind tunnels to demonstrate that a basic technology is possible, then let the Boeings and Rockwell Internationals figure out how to sell it to world commerce.

The difference between space technology and aeronautics technology is gradually disappearing. The next-generation launch vehicle is probably going to be very much like a transoceanic airliner that, with an additional kick from a rocket engine, can go up into orbit. Because you’ll go out into space when you fly from Tokyo to New York, you’ll be able to stay up there and dock in a space station. When we can take a civilian airliner with extra rocket power into orbit, the price of flying into orbit should come down to what is comparable to buying a ticket between New York and Tokyo. Q: Given NASA’s current problems, don’t your predictions seem a bit premature? A: Before you look 50 years into the future, you must look back to 1935. Despite a tremendous history of American growth, nobody in 1935 predicted (the country) would keep growing. Everybody was acting like they’d be lucky to hang on. “Our children won’t live as well as we did; we’ll probably never get out of this Depression,” was what they said. Q: What’s in space that’s important enough to offset the development costs private enterprise would incur simply to get there? A: One reason for going into space is to take advantage of the unique zero-gravity environment. On Earth, when you mix two alloys in a crucible to make a semiconductor, for example, gravity makes the heavier of the two settle toward the bottom so you’re unable to get the extremely high degree of uniformity in crystal structures. The same situation applies with vaccines and pharmaceuticals, where you’re trying to separate out one type of thing versus another. A weightless environment produces extremely high degrees of purity. Manufacturing in low Earth orbit will be expensive, but if you’re giving immunity from disease, people will pay for that kind of project. Q: Are there natural resources on the moon or Mars that would make mining commercially feasible? A: Well, we don’t think that there’s anything on the moon or Mars we don’t have on Earth. But the difference is that the moon and Mars are regoliths, where all of the elements are just sort of spread out into a surface powder. It may very well be possible that rather heavy elements such as iridium and platinum--which, through the processes of geologic change, have been taken down to the center of the Earth--may be quite abundant on the surface of the moon. It isn’t clear that the moon will be good for mining, but all the metals you want are there. Since the moon has no atmosphere, you don’t have to separate iron oxide. You can just go along with a magnet or run a conveyor belt past a magnet, and metallic iron will jump right up. The moon’s ideal for powder metallurgy because its metals already are powder.

The rocks of the moon are composed of about 40% oxygen, and since oxygen is one of our spacecraft fuels, one of the first products to be exported from the moon will be rocket fuel. Let’s have private industries supply that oxygen to NASA on the moon. In other words, NASA could give the contract to a university to develop a process; then NASA could put together a pilot plan. But once feasibility has been demonstrated, NASA should give a contract to Exxon or somebody to supply so many gallons per day of liquid oxygen on the moon. Q: Since everything we need in a material sense can be found on the floor of the ocean or in other unexplored regions, such as Antarctica, don’t many scientists believe that research and development funds should stay here on Earth? A: Natural resources here are at the bottom of an enormous gravity well. To use any of that material in space would cost you a hell of a lot to lift it up. If you want to use materials to build things in space for use in space, it makes much more sense to use materials you can pick up on the moon or the asteroids. Q: You make it seem as though we have an obligation to explore space . But isn’t it the government’s responsibility to improve the life of people on Earth? If all the materials we need can be found here, why bother to go into space? A: In addition to the benefits of weightlessness, space provides a great vantage point for Earth surveillance. From Earth orbit you can broadcast directly to a whole hemisphere, or look at the weather, or provide navigation information. Instead of having control towers at every airport in the United States, you could have one orbiting radar linked to a single computer that locates and directs every airplane in the hemisphere. Instead of having little antennas on little Hughes satellites, we’re going to want huge, solar-powered platforms with high-precision antennas so the antennas here on the ground--of which there will be hundreds of millions--will be tiny, instead of the big satellite dishes you see now. Space allows us to turn communications inside out. Once we have manufacturing and communication platforms orbiting 24,000 miles up (a tenth of the way to the moon), it might begin to make sense to bring some of that iron and fiberglass over from the moon as opposed to bringing it up from Earth, simply because it is so much cheaper to bring things out at low gravity than to lift them all up from the surface of Earth. Q: It’s nice to have satellite weather photographs and instant communication, but the poor in this country might argue that the only thing they’ve gotten out of the space program is Tang. Shouldn’t we solve the problems of Earth before we spend more on space? A: Yes, but what we’re talking about is a minuscule sum of money. Americans spend a hundred billion dollars a year on (illicit) drugs and we spend less than 10 (billion) on space. It’s a very sloppy intellectual argument to say that because there are poor people you can’t afford (to devote money to) art or space or science. This country has a $4-trillion annual product. Per capita income is around $15,000 a year. If you want to tackle the problem of the poor in this country, tackle it. But don’t argue we have the poor because we’re spending money on space or weapons. Q: You mentioned the effect on commercial aviation as a spinoff of this research . What other impact might 3the average American see? A: We’re moving into areas where men have never been before. Every time we’ve tried to learn about electricity or medicine or magnetism, people on Earth have benefited in ways that could not be predicted. Nobody knew that Pasteur’s experiments eventually would reduce disease. A jet engine is developed because the Nazis are shooting down our B-17s. We didn’t know then that it would lead to a global network of jet transportation and one of California’s biggest industries. When Marconi studied radio signals, he didn’t know it would lead to color television and Japanese VCRs. If you believe the result of the Apollo program was that we brought back 800 pounds of rock, you really miss the whole point.

America has to ask itself if it wants to keep its technological edge over the rest of the world. The man on the street--the poor, if you like--may want to take his $15,000 a year and invest it in more leisure time, more campers, more health. These are all good things. All we argue is, let’s take a very tiny fraction of our national wealth and invest it in pioneering the space frontier. Q: Still, even the boldest of visions needs a practical application. A: Suppose we can set up a closed biological community on the moon or Mars that’s completely self-supporting. Then there would be an alternative to all the great irrigation projects that have been proposed to bring water from Alaska down into the Southwest and into Mexico and make the deserts bloom. Instead of all that pumping, maybe we could just create, based on these prototype space farms, a recyclable environment. It would be a new concept of desert agriculture that could transform the Sahara, the American Southwest, the whole central part of Australia, from sunbaked, barren nothings into areas that actually would be preferred for farming because you’d get the sunlight every day of the year. Now I don’t know that that would come out of this program, but it would be a way to learn how to do things like that. Q: Your report comes out during a period in which NASA is under close scrutiny. How has the organization changed since you were in charge 16 years ago? A: In the Apollo program, NASA was an organization doing what man had never done before. It was in the forefront of science, and it required all of us to be knowledgeable in every detail of each launch because nothing like that had ever been done. The space shuttle Challenger was lost on the 25th launch. It was seen as a reasonably routine operation. The country is not asking NASA to carry out bold programs; it only asks that routine operations go on at less cost. It’s a cheaper NASA than the one that I was associated with. Q: Has NASA become flawed and seriously deficient , as the presidential investigative panel headed by William P. Rogers has suggested? A: If William Rogers says it’s flawed, I think he’s probably right, but I sort of understand why. It has become a routine operation and because of that, probably some complacency had set in. Q: What do you think will be the practical effect on NASA of this close and prolonged scrutiny? A: I think it will probably result in some reorganizations and particularly some new people. I doubt there’s very much the Rogers commission is going to find out that NASA isn’t also finding out. NASA’s own internal reform activities will undoubtedly lead to a tightening up of all of these things. But don’t look for fundamental change. It isn’t the structure that is wrong; it was the implementation that got sloppy. Q: Does this country have the resources to defend itself at present levels and journey to Mars and beyond at the same time? A: We devote a tremendous amount of our resources to maintaining peace through the principle of mutually assured destruction. I’m not against that principle; in fact, I’m for it. The fact that we’ve gone 40 years without a third world war has allowed us to achieve our $15,000-per-capita income. But do we really want to continue to depend on a policy of destruction to preserve the peace? Wouldn’t it be better to work together on bold new adventures like the exploration of space? I think we ought to ask the same scientists who are working on destruction to put some of their efforts into working together positively to create new habitats for mankind beyond Earth. Successful colonies on the moon and Mars would at least be an insurance policy against the destruction of high-tech civilization here on Earth. We would have a couple of small seeds else-where that presumably would be spared that same destruction. Q: Should the U.S. venture into the solar system alone, or must space exploration be an international effort? A: There’s nothing wrong with nationalism. It has great advantages, and a couple of major disadvantages--war being the chief among them. But I think when you start looking at a planetary movement of our species, which is really parallel to the movement of life from the oceans out onto land billions of years ago, to do this on a nationalistic basis doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s a movement of all mankind, and we ought to do it on a planet-wide basis.

Now, I argue that America should lead. I believe we have the highest technology in the world, the strongest economy, a frontier tradition. We also possess the richest diversity of ethnic groups in the world. There are genes in this country from every corner of the Earth, and for that reason I think we’re the logical people to make sure that when we move out to these new worlds, we take with us all of the cultural diversity of mankind. Q: Do the people of the United States have the political will equal to the challenge? A: That, I think, is the real question. We certainly have the resources. America in the next century must use its wealth in creative ways. And a whole new generation of technologists can automate our factories and fields, but at the same time we can use a small part of this capability to open a whole new frontier for mankind. All the resources, all the space, all the energy we could ever imagine is available to us. We don’t have to be stuck with a Malthusian little planet where the name of the game is how to manage scarcity. We can create wealth instead of trying to ration scarcity.