The Politics of Space Exploration

Remember, remember the 5th of November! This year the most memorable rocket to be fired was The Mars Orbiter Mission which was launched from the east coast of India. While the success of the launch was widely celebrated by the Indian media as an event that would fuel "the ambition of a nation, and the imagination of many others", it is also seen by some as evidence of a stark injustice present in a country where 32.7% of the population live below the poverty line. "Incredible India: we can go to Mars but cannot provide clean water to our people on Earth", tweeted Tavleen Singh, a writer for the Indian Express.

Complaints like these echo those made in the late 1960s when NASA launched Apollo 11, the first manned mission to the moon. 'The moon and the ghetto problem' refers to the concern felt by many that 'great leaps' were being made in aeronautics while the issue of inner-city poverty was being neglected. Such frustrations prompted The Rev. Ralph Abernathy, considered to be the successor to the recently martyred Martin Luther King, to lead a protest march to the site of the launch, objecting that the effort put towards the Moon Landing ought instead be spent on social programs. Similarly, musician Gil Scott-Heron was moved to record the song Whitey on the Moon regarding the disparity between America's scientific successes and its social failings: "No hot water, no toilets, no lights. (but Whitey's on the moon)". More broadly, this concern highlights the question of how, or if, science can be made to work towards the public benefit.

One may argue that the technological advances such as those made in space flight are responsible for the production of more socially beneficial technologies. According to NASA, its own space exploration has resulted in the development of 1750 'spin-offs' for the betterment of life in the terrestrial domains of health and medicine, consumer goods, transportation, renewable energy, and manufacturing. Likewise, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), recently used its expertise in weather satellites to provide direct assistance through its Disaster Management Support programme during last month's coastal cyclone.

In broader terms however, faith in the power of science and technology to improve social conditions as a by-product may be undeserved when one considers the global inequality that has provided an enduring backdrop to technological advance. This has forced others, such as Alvin M. Weinberg to question whether science and technology can be used deliberately to produce social gains. Although Weinberg admits that social problems do not easily yield to technological engineering he asserts that in certain situations quick technological fixes are desirable in order to buy us more time in approaching the issue using social methods. Writing in 1966, in anticipation of the Apollo mission he suggests that

"our country will soon have to decide whether to continue to spend $5.5 x 10⁹ per year for space exploration after our lunar landing. Is it too outrageous to suggest that some of this money be devoted to building huge nuclear desalting complexes...?"

Perhaps not. Daniel Sarewitz and Richard Nelson provide 3 rules which aim to determine whether a technological fix will be a success or failure. They are as follows:

1. The technology must largely embody the cause–effect relationship connecting problem to solution.
2. The effects of the technological fix must be assessable using relatively unambiguous or uncontroversial criteria.
3. Research and development is most likely to contribute decisively to solving a social problem when it focuses on improving a standardized technical core that already exists.

Technologies which fail to fit this bill should not be expected to succeed, at least in the short to medium term. Instead, advances will mostly be achieved through context-dependent trial-and-error at the level of public policy and organizational management.

With regards to nuclear desalination, the technology has long been established in different conditions and within different nations, which would point towards a context-independent stable core, and it has an easily identifiable effect. However, as Sarewitz and Nelson are keen to point out, "technological fixes do not offer a path to moral absolution, but to technical resolution". Furthermore, unintended consequences found in technological application such as the beneficial 'spin-offs' provided by space exploration also surface in the guise of unwelcome risks and uncertainties.

However, to frame the debate in the terms of Weinberg and the critics of the past, and more recent, space endeavours may be a political act in itself. As Leigh Philips writes in Put Whitey Back on the Moon, "It’s a false choice to say: either space or everything else". To suggest this is to apply neo-liberal metrics based on the myth of extremely limited public funds and the need for immediate return on investment.

When analysing the interplay of science and society, it is important to recognise that politics and ideology are inherent in our own explorations.