I Want to Go to Mars

Had I been selected, I would have been on the Challenger Space Shuttle when it exploded on January 28, 1986.  I had applied for the Teacher in Space program, and was much distressed when I was not Missouri’s candidate.  God works in mysterious ways. 

Of course, my whole life has been linked to this countries space program.  Part of it is simply when I grew up.  My family tracked Sputnik across the sky and worried about the Russians beating us into space and what that meant to the cold war.  Our nation’s history, from Alan Shepard’s first suborbital flight in May of 1961 to Apollo 11’s landing on the moon, July 20, 1969, has been my history.

I probably owe my first job to the space program—and herein lies today’s lesson.  In 1964, when I graduated from college, I started looking for a teaching job in the numerous suburban school districts around St. Louis.  The Hazelwood School District lay next to the huge McDonnell Douglas complex along with its space contracts and thousands of employees.  All of these people lived in the area in newly purchased tract housing and they bought modest sized American made cars.  Ford Motors, Chrysler and General Motors all operated factories in the North County and North St. Louis areas.  They also employed thousands of people (it took 1,000 workers just to operate the corvette line).  All of these people had jobs that went from technical to scientific, skilled to support, scientific to custodial.  They all had dignity, a paycheck and they all spent that money on other things.  A job with a disposable income is a free market stimulus plan.

They also had families who needed education.  The year I was hired to teach 4^th grade, Hazelwood was opening up three new elementary schools.  I would like to think they hired me because they knew what a fine teacher I would be, but the truth is they needed so many of us that if the body was warm you were hired.   So, probably, in the grand dance that economics is, I owe my first job as much to the space program as my degree from a very good school of education.   The point is that in economics there is something called a multiplier effect.  For each $1 put in circulation, because it is used and reused in ever decreasing amounts, it generates much more than a single dollars worth of goods and services. 

            The space program that employed me (by putting money into circulation through people living and supporting a specific community) is coming to an end.  Our mission is not at an end.  There is so much more we need to know about science, space and our solar system.  But we have no program and no money allocated to space science.  We have empty words and vague promises but hot air has no multiplier effect.   I have a suggestion.  Why not take stimulus money and spend it on smart people?  Why not forget about giving money to countries that hate us, or local governments that seem to lose track of it as it lines the pockets of political hacks, and fund a new space program instead?  Why not do what has worked in the past, and use money for high ticket, high end, intelligent projects.  Forget shovel ready.  How about engineering ready, or laboratory ready?  If we are going to give money to people, how about giving it to people who actually know what to do with it.  Let’s go to Mars.