The Case for Moonshots

Image credit: NASA

2021 has been a tipping point for space exploration.

In just over two months, space opened up to private citizens. Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos raced their rockets to the edge of space. The all-civilian SpaceX Inspiration4 mission ascended above the International Space Station and orbited the Earth for three days!

These awe-inspiring events have been a respite from the never-ending months of the pandemic.

They also raised some valid questions. Is this the most important thing we should be focusing our resources on? Shouldn’t we address more urgent problems, like solving climate change? 

These questions are hard to ignore, as the West Coast of the US and Greece are ablaze, violent hurricanes are on a rampage, and floods are displacing thousands of people all around the world, from Southeast Asia to Germany.

It is not climate change versus space exploration, though. There is a deeper question lurking here: should we sacrifice moonshots — ambitious pursuits of long-term monumental goals — to first solve all the urgent problems right in front of us? Can’t we be working on both at the same time, or is this a zero-sum game? Let’s take a closer look.

Why shouldn’t we be taking moonshots?

​The central argument against moonshots is resourcing: we are allocating capital that could be put to use on solving more important problems. 

In 2021, NASA received measly 0.65% of US taxpayer dollars, dwarfed by roughly 20% each for Medicare and defense spending. And the National Science Foundation, whose stated mission is “to promote the progress of science”, is receiving just one-third of NASA’s budget. To put this in perspective, if you were making the median annual salary in the US, this would limit you to just one small cup of coffee per week. 

If I told you that you can make an outsized positive impact on the future of humanity at the cost of a few cups of joe a week, surely you would be okay with that, right?

There is no question that we need to attract more human and financial capital, across governments and the private sector to solve burning issues. But doing so at the cost of killing moonshots and choking the already resource-starved blue skies research would be irresponsible. Using the example of space exploration, let me show you why.

Why should we be taking moonshots?

Existential risk

66 million years ago a quite literally earth-shattering event happened: an asteroid hit the Earth, wiping out dinosaurs, along with 75% of the species that lived on the planet at the time. Could this happen again any time soon? According to a widely used method for evaluating such risks, the chances of a similar-sized asteroid hitting Earth in the next hundred years is 1 in 100 million. Doesn’t sound likely, does it?

Alas, humans are notoriously bad at estimating the probability of black swan events. It intuitively makes sense: a lot of our estimates are based on the experiences that we have either personally lived through, or that had been passed down to us from the previous generations.

If you are in the who-cares-about-asteroids camp, consider the more recent example of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite having access to more historical data — pandemics are way more frequent than asteroid hits — we failed to estimate the risk and brushed this off as unlikely. This time we had the technology to respond: we engineered and mass-produced the vaccines in record time. Next time, when we face a truly existential risk, we might not get lucky.

Currently, all of our civilizational eggs are in one planetary basket. And while an asteroid impact or the next plague seem unlikely to us now, it would be sad to see the only intelligent life that we know of vanish without a trace. Building our second home elsewhere in the Solar system is a bet that can ensure our species survives in the long run.

Exploration

Before you despair, let me try and lift your spirits. Homo Sapiens are explorers at heart. Throughout history, we pushed the borders of our known world farther and farther out: from our ancestors spreading all around the globe from the African savannah to the brave seafarers of the Age of Discovery, to the chilling thrill of the Polar exploration, to leaving our footprints in the Moon dust.

As we stretched the physical boundaries, we expanded the limits of our knowledge of the world. Today, we continue doing so in space.

NASA’s robotic probes that observe our cosmic neighbors are essential for understanding Earth’s past and future. Their measurements suggested, for instance, that Venus may have once been habitable, but the runaway greenhouse effect heated it way past your oven’s limits. Studying this further will be invaluable for modeling climate change outcomes on our home planet.

The planned human missions to the Moon and Mars over the next two decades are also set to propel science forward. They will attempt to answer the fundamental question of human existence: where did life originate?

The thrill of the adventure and the veil of mystery are just too irresistible for humans: we have conquered all but the last of the physical frontiers, and our destiny is in the stars.

Second-order effects

Our ambitions in space fueled a lot of innovation that we are enjoying in our everyday lives. 

Satellites help us navigate and provide internet access to remote areas. They keep tabs on climate effects: thinning ice, coral reef degradation, ozone holes, fires and hurricanes, to name just a few. Advances in materials science are redefining the future of manufacturing. MRI and CAT scans use digital imaging processing techniques originally introduced by NASA. 

Technologies that we develop as we explore space can have unexpected applications back on Earth — the second-order effects.

Take the example of GPS. It’s not something we envisioned when we first dreamed of going to space. It’s not something that Einstein could have imagined either when he worked on his special and general relativity theories. Yet, we heavily rely on both to make the GPS work: the time on the faraway satellites ticks faster than on Earth. If we didn’t adjust for that, the maps could place you by the Statue of Liberty just as you were entering Central park…

Inspiration

It is upon us to inspire the generations that follow, just as the ones that came before inspired us. We need a vision that can captivate the entire world: a vision of an ever-expanding civilization reaching for the infinite frontier.

If our predecessors had focused on only managing the apocalypse, if they had refused to dream big and live in the future, few of the things that we take for granted today would have become a reality. As Elon Musk said recently: “If life is just about problems, what is the point of living?”

Onward

Moonshots don’t end with space exploration or the original Apollo 11 Moon shot. Take other crowning achievements of human ingenuity that have happened since: the internet, mapping the human genome, CRISPR.

These advances helped address existential risks, pushed the boundaries of our understanding, unleashed positive compounding effects and inspired next generations of scientists, engineers and explorers.

So as we put our heads down to solve the biggest challenges of our time, let’s also find the time to look up and dream big.