"How many more years I shall be able to work on the problem, I do not know; I hope, as long as I live. There can be no thought of finishing, for 'aiming at the stars,' both literally and figuratively, is a problem to oc­cupy generations, so that no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just begin­ning . . ."

So said Robert Goddard in 1932.* (*Quoted by F. C. Durant III, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, in a paper prepared for the Second Symposium on the History of Astronaut­ics, 1968.)

Now we face the last Apollo mission, the final flight in the program that saw Goddard's pioneering work cul­minate in man's reaching the Moon.

Instead of the thrill of beginning, we face the reality that there will be no more manned exploration of the Moon. Not for a long time to come. It's scant comfort that Robert Heinlein predicted a hiatus in space ex­ploration during "the Crazy Years." The science fiction community is filled with people who know that man belongs in space. The White House and Congress are occupied by people who know that the nation can't afford manned space missions.

These positions can't both be right.

Leaving philosophical arguments to one side, for the moment, what are the cold realities of manned space flight? Is there a place for man in space, a place that can be justified by practical results, by political, technological, economic payoffs?

Obviously, the American body politic has decided that the answer is no. In the restructuring of political priorities that's taken place over the past several years, science in general has been handed a broom and told to clean up the mess we're living in. When you sweep floors, your eyes can't be on the stars.

The main problem is that the poli­ticians—and the voters—don't have a long enough view to appreciate how vital man in space can be to them over the next decade, and the next, and all the years following. The na­ture of the political process is such that both the voters and the politi­cians seek immediate answers to all problems. Immediate gratification: like a baby that wants attention now, no matter that Mamma is busy cook­ing dinner, and if she doesn't attend to it now, there won't be any dinner later. Who cares about later? Imme­diate gratification. Give me what I want now.

The men who've tried to convince the public that space exploration is important—particularly manned space exploration—have failed al­most totally in their task. The Ameri­can public backed the space program when there was a political race against the Russians. And, largely without knowing about it, they fi­nanced a true life-and-death race to develop ICBM's, back in the late 1950's and early '60's.

The space program, the explora­tion of the Moon and planets, was sold on the basis of racing the Russians, amid television spectaculars. Well, the Russians apparently quit the race, which took most of the sus­pense out of things. And after you've seen a couple of men collecting rocks on the Moon, the next pair look remarkably similar, even if they've got a buggy to ride around in. The gee­whiz thrill of Moon walking wore out about as quickly as the popu­larity of any TV show that offers the same script every time. Apollo 11 was a smashing success, as far as TV ratings went. Apollo 13 was almost as good, because of the very real danger to the astronauts in their crippled spacecraft. But success after success dulled the TV audience, and the ratings of "the Apollo show" have dropped precipitously. So the show's been canceled.

If space exploration can't be "sold" to the public as a race against the Red menace, or as a TV spec­tacular, how can it be sold? Only in terms of practical payoffs. And those payoffs are years in the future. So manned missions to the Moon and planets are no longer part of our space program. And ALL manned space flights, even the Earth orbital operations, stand a good chance of being throttled down to nothing.

This would be worse than a mis­take; it would be a major blunder.

Space operations are here to stay. Our society is starting to become de­pendent on them. In another ten years, our global communications network will be built around orbital relay satellites. Not because they're more glamorous, but because they can relay messages more efficiently and cheaply than cables or long chains of antennas. As all forms of electronic communications are forced to go to shorter and shorter wavelengths—from microwaves to la­ser light—satellites will be indis­pensable, because these short wavelengths are limited to straight-line, horizon-to-horizon operations. Satellites can raise the horizon to the dimensions of the planet's equator.

The problems we face in popu­lation pressure and pollution mean that the entire globe must be in­spected constantly for a number of reasons: the oceans must be sur­veyed for food fish and plankton, farmlands must be watched for early signs of crop diseases, forests must be provided with early warning against fire, pollution must be stopped at its source, the world's weather must be monitored and pre­dicted accurately and reliably.

We are—despite the politicians—making the transition from a planet consisting of separate nations to a planet consisting of one single inter­dependent culture. Our world society is now a global society, and what happens in obscure hamlets in Southeast Asia affects Wall Street. This global, interdependent society is already using satellite observation platforms for military purposes, where individual members of the world community who are trying to protect their own survival, are also guarding the survival of the whole world. In the decade to come, satel­lite observation platforms will pro­vide information vital to mankind's day-to-day existence; information about food, impending natural dis­asters, new resources, pollution pat­terns.

By that famous date, 1984, most of mankind should be heavily depen­dent on satellites for all these things and more. Just as we could not sup­port today's society without electric­ity and automobiles, we'll be unable to run tomorrow's society without the information produced by satel­lite observation stations.

But such satellites need not be manned. In fact, from the first Telstar to the recent prototype Earth Resources Technology Satellite, all these observation platforms have been unmanned.

But there comes a time when the complexity and cost of these increas­ingly important unmanned satellites make it imperative that they operate reliably and continuously for many years. You can tolerate an on-again, off-again performance from an ex­perimental Telstar. But when half the nation's business and data ex­change goes through satellite relays, the satellites must be reliable. You can't shut off the relay for a few weeks—unless you're willing to stop most of the factories, food deliveries, electrical power distribution, trans­portation and information flow across the continent. To say nothing of the transoceanic traffic. And weather predictions.

When unmanned satellites are so integrally a part of our world, men in space will be irreplaceable: It may be slightly less than glamorous, but the first men who will be really needed in space are going to be repairmen. Be­cause, ultimately, the cost of putting repairmen into orbit to maintain and service existing unmanned satellites will be lower than placing a new un­manned satellite in orbit whenever an existing satellite blows a transis­tor.

Sooner or later, it will be cheaper—and safer—to keep crews in orbit for weeks or months at a time, to repair and maintain satellites on regular schedules, and to be avail­able for special emergency repairs. And once a permanent manned sta­tion is established, it will develop into a manned observation platform, adding the real-time judgments and insights of human observers to the coverage of the unmanned satellites.

All of this development depends on making launching costs low enough so that the costs of orbiting men and equipment are tolerable. The space shuttle is a first step in that direction. Up until now, all manned launches were a matter of research and adventure, with costs a low priority behind safety and the primary goal of just getting there: into orbit, at first, and then onto the moon. Now that we've demonstrated that men can reach the Moon and work in orbit, the next step is to bring down the costs of manned space operations. The shuttle is NASA’s first answer to that problem. It will be able to place fifteen to twenty tons in orbit around the Earth, and will be reusable.

There's more to come, if the politi­cians allow it. Current plans for the shuttle call for a throwaway booster. Like all the rocket launches to date, the shuttle's booster will be used once, and deposited into the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean. The next step will be a returnable, no-deposit booster, capable of being used over and over again. And beyond that, scientists are already making numbers about using a very high-powered laser to boost a rocket from ground to orbit. The laser provides the energy, but stays on the ground, reusable as long as it's fed electricity. The rocket can dispense with a booster stage alto­gether, and can be fifty percent payload. When that happy day arrives, manned space flight will start to be­come as cheap as long-range com­mercial air travel.

There are political aspects to space operations. For example, the reason the United States agreed to an arms limitation treaty with Russia without the on-site inspections we had in­sisted on for decades, is that our ob­servation satellites are now good enough to see what the intelligence people want to see, and can count missile silos quite clearly and accu­rately, without risking the embar­rassing and deadly kind of fiasco that Francis Gary Powers crashed into in the late 1950's. The Russians, of course, have their own observation satellites watching how many silos we dig, and helping the cartogra­phers make accurate maps for ICBM guidance systems to follow.

The ICBM itself spends most of its active life in space, despite the fact that it sits for years in a silo and is aimed for a ground target. If a mis­sile war comes, the outcome could well be decided in space. Any ABM system, to be effective, should inter­cept the hostile missiles in space and destroy them there. A low-altitude intercept, over your own territory, might be nothing more than a Pyr­rhic victory. So you destroyed the enemy ICBM before it reached Washington. The recently deceased citizens of Baltimore send their post­humous congratulations!

If space is a potential battle­ground, then both manned and unmanned satellites are going to have important roles to play. Satellites might become useful as ABM sta­tions, armed with early-warning sen­sors, tracking systems, and weapons for destroying the ICBM's in their thirty-minute-long flight from silo to re-entry. Once the missile re-enters the atmosphere near its target, the defense has only a minute or so to react. The vast benefits of fighting an ICBM in space, and using men rather than preprogrammed weapons, was beautifully illustrated way back in the August 1960 issue of Analog, in Joseph P. Martino's "Pushbutton War."

So, in peace or war, for the en­hancement of the quality of life, for the protection of the nation and the people, man in space is inevitable. Today, no nation can be economi­cally strong and politically indepen­dent without such things as heavy in­dustry and modern transportation systems. Tomorrow, no nation will be economically strong and politi­cally independent without access to manned space operations. It's that simple. And urgent. If the United States abandons manned space flight, even for only five years, we may find ourselves in a very uncom­fortable political situation, where the Russians have convinced themselves that they can stop enough of our missiles so that they can absorb a nu­clear strike and still destroy the United States. Their belief needn't necessarily be true; all they have to do is believe it. Then they'll be in a position to say, "Do what we de­mand, or else."

All this is the strictly practical, economic and political side of man in space. From the standpoint of hard dollars and sense, it would be folly to, let our manned space capa­bility wither away.

Still on the strictly practical side, it seems logical that the supply depot for manned Earth orbital operations will eventually be the Moon, not Earth. Once there's enough equip­ment on the Moon to produce water and its constituents, hydrogen and oxygen, the Moon can "manufac­ture" a space station's air, water, food and rocket propellants. And it's much cheaper to launch these sup­plies "downhill" from the Moon's airless surface to an Earth-orbiting station, rather than "uphill" from Earth's surface to orbit.

All very practical.

And all based on the assumption that the decision-makers in our gov­ernment require near-immediate gratification; the assumption that they can plan and work toward ob­jectives that are no more than five to ten years in the future. The Apollo program itself was originally timed to take place almost entirely during the lifetime of the Kennedy Admin­istration. One of the hurdles that NASA planners constantly face is the necessity to lay out programs that culminate during the lifetime of the administration that sponsors the plan. A president likes to look ahead eight years, but can only count on four. A senator has six, a congressman two.

It might be too much to ask for political leaders who can look be­yond their own re-election cam­paigns. It might be too much to ask for men and women who understand that, in the long run, the scientific knowledge and understanding pro­duced from space operations will make us all wealthier, just as the ex­plorations of the Renaissance made mankind far wealthier than he had ever been. Knowledge is the only real-wealth; it produces all else, from gold bullion to credit cards. It would certainly be presumptuous to ask for political leaders who can understand that the space program does not con­flict with the nation's other needs: indeed, the space program can con­tribute handsomely to the nation's gross national product. It can be profitable, and will be, if we are wise enough to invest in it properly.

No need to get mystical and cast wondering eyes toward Mars and be­yond. There are eminently practical reasons for man in space, reasons that will affect the price of potatoes and the nation's balance of payments overseas, reasons that will count heavily in our military posture and our foreign policy.

And when even the politicians un­derstand that man in space is politi­cally and economically indispens­able, the stars will still be there.

THE EDITOR