Neil deGrasse Tyson is an accomplished astrophysicist and popular author whose latest book, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier, lays out the case for continuing to advance the space frontier. Tyson is the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, as well as an astrophysics research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. He served on the Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry in 2001 and the President’s Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy in 2004, and is known for his passionate advocacy for space exploration.
Last week I had the chance to talk with Tyson about why he thinks space exploration is a necessary economic driver, and why funding NASA is an investment the U.S. government can’t ignore.
You’ve noted that NASA’s budget isn’t as much an expenditure as an investment.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: I think many people don’t think of it that way, but that’s certainly how I see it. And how the history of that money has revealed itself in our economy.
And the return on the investment comes in the form of innovation and technological advancement?
That’s correct. Not only innovations that come directly from solving the challenges of advancing a space frontier, but also the culture and society that arises from being a participant in that frontier. In other words, yes, of course you have to innovate to discover something tomorrow that you didn’t know today – some new idea has to arise, some new solution to a problem. Some new material has to be invented. Of course. That would go on, with direct reference to space achievements.
In fact, NASA puts out a book called Spin Offs, which is a complete discussion of all the fundamental patents and discoveries that became commercial products in the year preceding. But I would argue that that’s not even the greatest value of NASA. It’s the shift in attitude that it brings upon our culture, where people then see and feel the role that innovations in science and technology play in their lives. They embrace that as a part of the identity of our culture itself.
You get people innovating even if they’re not directly related to the space program, because we have an innovation culture. I assert that that was the culture that prevailed in the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers – poets, actors, journalists – they, as communities, embrace the meaning of what it is to be scientifically literate. They embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They don’t fight science and they don’t fight technology. They recognize how fundamental those activities are to the identity of the nation, but more importantly to the economic health of the nation. Because these are the engines of the economy.
You can look at the 1960s, the peak of space exploration, and I think many people would characterize that period as the peak of the attitude that you’re talking about. So why is there this disconnect now? Why do people think of space exploration as an academic pursuit?
Because they don’t think of it the same way. They just don’t. I think I understand why – I didn’t do the tests on this, but it’s plausibly correct that we live in an era where we think of the solutions to problems by applying money directly to that problem.
For example, we need more scientists; let’s improve our science teachers. OK, we’re done there. We need more jobs; let’s create more factories so we have more jobs. We want more innovation; there are companies that do innovation, let’s fund those more.
The idea is that somehow these are all separate problems and we go over and just fix them one by one. But in fact, by my read of history, by my read of human behavior, by my read of government funding streams, these efforts amount to no more than Band-Aids on sores that have opened up in our society caused by a much deeper absence – the absence of an innovation culture.
So when you say “NASA creates jobs,” people think it’s because tax money buys the jobs that NASA pays directly for. The direct A-to-B thinking again. It takes more than a few steps of reasoning to see how NASA influences a culture and how that culture innovates, creates the economies of tomorrow, stabilizes and then grows your economy. That’s a multi-step exercise that certainly economists understand easily. To writers for Forbes, it’s self-evident. But everybody else, apparently not.
When you put money directly to a problem, it makes a good headline. It makes a good campaign slogan. You get to claim that you’ve engaged in these activities within an election cycle. But certain investments take longer than an election cycle. Those that take longer than an election cycle tend to be susceptible to people wanting to redirect them to immediate problems that they see sitting right in front of them.
This manifests itself even at the highest levels. The America COMPETES Act emerged from Congress – and the President signed a version of it – the President extols the value of NASA, back in that era, as the engine of economic innovation, of scientific and technological innovation leading to a booming economy. He says this. And then says (and I’m paraphrasing), “Given that we’re in the doldrums now, we’re going to re-invest in our science and technology.” And he talks about increasing the budget for the National Science Foundation and for the Department of Energy Science, which is the physics labs, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a little-known agency of the government that is very important. NASA is barely mentioned. Actually, he tops up NASA for one year, gives a 5% increase to NASA for one year, and then takes it back a year later.
Meanwhile, NASA formed the substance of the rhetoric that led to the speech that announced this plan. The America COMPETES Act put those same three agencies on a doubling path for their budget, and NASA went unmentioned. So there seems to be a disconnect.
People say, “We need more basic science? Let’s fund basic science research agencies like the National Science Foundation.” But who’s going to do that research? Doesn’t somebody have to be motivated to do it in the first place? Doesn’t there have to be some dream that people have, and reach for and feel compelled to participate in?
It goes back to the quote that I’ve heard you mention a couple of times – if you want to get people to build a boat, don’t drum up wood and supplies, teach them to yearn for the open sea.
I always corrupt the quote, but that’s the sense of it. [“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”] Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Who himself was an aviator and the author of The Little Prince, by the way. But he understood that when you long for the open sea, then the details of boat building all resolve themselves. Your dreams take care of that. It becomes self-motivated; you don’t even have to be taught it. You figure it out yourself, and in the process you innovate another way to do it, as well.
So you advocate doubling NASA’s budget.
From .5% of the federal budget, I say double it. That would give NASA enough money to do everything everyone has wanted NASA to do over all these years and enable us to go back to the moon and on to Mars in a bold and audacious way. Where it’s visible and advancements are being made weekly if not daily. And everyone says, “Oh, we’re going to Mars. We need biologists for that, because we might find life. We need aerospace engineers.”
And all of a sudden, all of the great science and engineering frontiers are aglow with the need to have the best students that are currently in the educational pipeline. That need will echo its way on down through to elementary school.
What’s the likelihood of such a budget increase happening? Does it take a foreign threat to make that happen?
There are a couple of drivers for this. Yes, war would be a driver; that’s what got us to the moon in the first place. Those that didn’t understand that somehow thought that “Oh, we’re on the moon by 1969, we’ll be on Mars by 1980.” That’s delusional. That means they didn’t understand why we went to the moon in the first place.
We didn’t go to the moon to explore or because it was in our DNA or because we’re Americans. We went because we were at war and we felt a threat. It was a kill-the-commie threat. In response to that threat we go to the moon. We find out that Russia’s not going to the moon – we’re done. Mars was never in anybody’s sights.
Of course, if China says it wants to put military bases on the moon or on Mars, we’re back. We’d be on Mars in two years if that were the case, no doubt about it. But no one wants war to be the driver for these things.
Fortunately, there’s another handy driver that has manifested itself throughout the history of cultures. The urge to want to gain wealth. That is almost as potent a driver as the urge to maintain your security. And that is how I view NASA going forward – as an investment in our economy.
By the way, in the 1960s we benefited from the economic influence of NASA and the cultural shift that it brought upon us. We benefited from that, but the motivation was war. So there was a cost, a heavy cost, of gaining that benefit – the cost of war and then the cost of NASA.
If we do it for economic reasons, then it’s just the cost of NASA. We don’t need the tandem investment in the cost of war. So the return on that investment – if you look at the total holistic picture – would be vastly greater than any return that could have happened in the 1960s.
I think people seem to overlook the idea of putting a dollar in and getting way more than a dollar back.
Way more. Of course, it’s hard to just run a calculation on that. If you did, it would be making a lot of assumptions en route to get to some dollar figure. A lot of this appeal, then, is simply to convey the sum of fundamental truths: That NASA innovates when it advances a frontier, and that innovations in science and technology are the engines of tomorrow’s economy.
When you innovate, you create new industries that then boost your economy. And when you create new industries and that becomes part of your culture, your jobs can’t go overseas because no one else has figured out how to do it yet.
When you stop innovating, as we have, then you stop thinking about tomorrow, because there’s no lure of having to wonder how you might invent a tomorrow that you just dreamt up, because people stop dreaming. When you do that – when you stop dreaming and you stop innovating – then you’re basically coasting. When you’re coasting, you eventually slow down and stop.
While that happens, other nations rise up, pass you by. And then we cry foul because they’re paying their employees less in their factories or we worry about trade tariffs. All of a sudden the conversation shifts from, “Here, you can have these jobs, because we don’t want them anyway, we’ve got these other jobs that we’ve just innovated,” to “Give us back our jobs, we need any jobs we can get.”
This is the line of reasoning. It takes a few steps. It might even take longer than an elevator ride to convey.
Imagine that. I think it would be interesting to for people to hear some examples of products that came from NASA developments. I know you mentioned LASIK as an example of one.
LASIK pre-dates the space program, but it was dangerous, error-prone and expensive. These are your eyes we’re talking about here! What NASA enabled in that procedure is for it to be done with precision, accurately and inexpensively. Now, hardly anyone doesn’t know someone who has had the procedure.
That was enabled by algorithms and tactics and techniques to dock the space shuttle with the space station. They wanted to do that accurately and reliably, without any damage to the surrounding hardware . There it is; directly applied to the LASIK surgery that people get today.
Also, the motivation to miniaturize electronics in the first place. That was driven by NASA because electronics back then were very heavy. Your grandparents had a radio that was a piece of furniture in their living room. Nobody at that time was saying, “Gee, I want to one day carry this in my pocket.” That just wasn’t a thought that anybody had. It was the living room radio.
The urge to miniaturize was motivated by NASA’s need to shave weight off of the payloads. Because every extra ounce you have to take, you pay a huge cost in fuel. Right now it’s like $10,000/pound to get something to low-Earth orbit. Once that movement got started, it became its own economically-driven enterprise. It doesn’t need to reference space today. But somebody got it started. Today that’s a $150 billion/year industry. The entire cost of going to the moon was about $100 billion.
Here’s an industry that thrives on the miniaturization of its components. It might have still happened, but it certainly wouldn’t have happened when it did. It certainly wouldn’t have happened as early as it did.
That’s fascinating.
There are many more examples. Space in general gave us GPS – that’s not specifically NASA, but it’s investments in space. There’s grooved pavements on the turns of roads – that’s low-tech, but greatly improves traction. Something no one had thought of until somebody really cared about the space shuttle landing on a runway. The space shuttle is not engine controlled as it lands, so they wanted to maximize traction and get that as secure as possible. They grooved the pavement, and there you have it: You have traction even under slippery conditions.
You have scratch-resistant lenses. And intracochlear implants, which are implants in the ear that enable completely deaf people to hear again because it stimulates the nerve endings that would have connected to the ear drum. That was a NASA invention.
Water filters. A NASA invention. You can say, “I need a way to filter water for my refrigerator.” I don’t know what a person would come up with, but nobody did. If you say instead, “There is a supply of water on a space station and it is the only supply of water we will ever have. I need a way to filter it.” That’s a cool problem to solve. Not just “Well you could get it out of your tap.”
We’re talking about how grand the problem is that is presented in front of smart and motivated people, people who want to make a difference in the world. Now we all have filtered water in our refrigerator. That’s all NASA.
By the way, that is not the best reason to fund NASA. I’m saying they happen to be reasons that also exist.
When the asteroid comes and it has our name on it? That’s a good reason right there. “Let’s deflect it.” “Oh no, we can’t because we’re under-invested in our space abilities.” That would be embarrassing if we went extinct from that.
Like you said, those aren’t the best reasons. But I think some people need those sorts of reasons.
They need the tangibility of it. This percolates across society as a motivation to do something cool and really interesting.
It really comes down to return on investment. It’s the greatest stoker of our economy that I know of and that I’ve seen in operation. Other than war; war does it too, but you’re also spending a lot more. You get great returns, but only at very great expense. With NASA, you get very great returns at a very small expense. And nobody dies unless, in fact, they are dying in an effort to expand a frontier, which is one of the noblest ways to go. Statues are built to such people. And there are those among us who embrace the risk, knowing that the reward is worth that risk.
