Neil Armstrong and Investing in Intelligence

Do you know who Gene Cernan is?  The Commander of Apollo 17, he was the last human being to walk on the moon.  It was December 13, 1972.  Not just my grandchildren, but my daughters don’t know what it is like to see live footage of an American walking the surface of the moon—let alone Mars, which is where we should be by now.  In so many ways, this country has lost its focus and our desertion of space exploration is probably the least cited but most telling.  Space exploration is knowledge for the sake of knowledge.  Pure science.  That which only a society sure of itself seeks. 

Our whole lives have been linked to the space program.  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 our history.  Now Neil Armstrong has died of old age, and it has been 40 years since we were last on the moon. 

Then the collective, “we” decided space was too expensive, too nerdy, too establishment.  Space exploration just didn’t tap dance.  Here is where short sightedness ruined what should have been a glorious and uplifting future. 

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 the workers 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.  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.   There is something called a multiplier effect in economics.  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 is now a shadow of its former self.  Instead of a mission, we have empty words and vague promises.   But hot air has no multiplier effect.   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 use it to line the pockets of political hacks, and fund a new space program instead?  Social engineering (and make no mistake, I hate it as much from the right as from the left) is a waste of time and treasure.  Real engineering has a proven track record.  Why not do what has worked in the past, and use money for high ticket, high end, science based projects.  If we are going to give money to people, give it to smart people.  They know what to do with it.  Let’s go to Mars. 

            Fund the space program and keep the faith.