This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, which was the first time man walked on the moon. December 11th, 1972 was the last time that man set foot on the moon. This means that it has been over 45 years since man last walked on the moon. I say “man” here because out of the 12 humans who have set foot on the moon, all of them happened to be men. One would think that with all the technological and societal advancements that we have made since the 70s, we would have made it back to the moon again already, and we definitely would have landed a woman on the moon. But alas, NASA had to stop sending men to the moon because they no longer had the money to fund the costly missions. In fact, in today’s terms, the cost of the Apollo missions would be roughly $152 billion. Because NASA stopped sending people to the moon, we now have to pay Russia roughly $80 million per astronaut to send them to the International Space Station. Of course with prices like these, there are going to be plenty of people opposed to furthering space exploration, when the money could be put towards a different area of need.

Here’s the dilemma: do we give NASA more money so that they can send people to the moon again, or do we allocate that money to a more important area of need in the United States? We must ask ourselves if the end goal of getting to the Moon was dedicated to scientific exploration, or was America simply trying to beat the Soviets as a way to show dominance? Interestingly enough, the United States has actually come pretty close to using space as a way to show military dominance over the Soviets through a little operation called Project A119. This was a military initiative undergone by the U.S. Air Force whose purpose was to strike the moon with a nuclear bomb. Yeah, you read that right. During the Space Race and the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force thought there was no better way to show off their power capabilities to the Soviet Union than by nuking the moon. They wanted the Soviets to be able to see the “mushroom cloud” of the nuclear blast from down on Earth, and thus, be struck with intense fear of the United States and its nuclear capabilities. Fortunately, the U.S. didn’t follow through with this plan since scientists determined that they would not receive the “mushroom cloud” reaction from the explosion that they would have wanted.

Thankfully, not everyone views space exploration as a means of promulgating military power like our current president does. Instead, there are people like Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, and Caroline Kennedy, daughter of John F. Kennedy, who have a more peaceful vision for the future of space exploration. In a recent interview with CBS, the Amazon CEO, supported by Kennedy, discussed his theory of The Great Inversion. He explains that currently we send things into space that are made on Earth, but through this Great Inversion, we will have highly manufactured products made in space and then sent back down to Earth. He gives the example of microprocessors as one of these products that would be helpful to have produced in space. Eventually, he believes that the Earth will be zoned solely residential, and that people will be able to choose between living on Earth or living somewhere else in space. If you think all of this sounds optimistic, wait until you hear what’s in store for Bezos’s aerospace company, Blue Origin.

Founded almost 20 years ago, Bezos’s Blue Origin has become one of the top tech companies to achieve many advancements in the field of space travel. Ever since Bezos was in high school, he has believed that the Earth is finite, and in order for the world economy and population to keep expanding, space exploration is the way to go. In fact, Jeff Bezos is so optimistic about space travel, that he believes he will journey to space within his lifetime. He plans to do this by pioneering a new industry dedicated to space tourism. One of his first projects in this new field is that of the suborbital rocket system named New Shepard, after the first American who traveled into space, Alan Shepard.

Aboard New Shepard, passengers will experience an 11 minute flight just above the Kármán Line, the internationally recognized boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and the boundary of outer space. If this sounds like something you’d be willing to try, then I suggest you visit Blue Origin’s website and reserve your seat. That way, when tickets for the 11 minute journey into space go on sale, you can be first in line (along with the many other people who have already reserved their seat too of course). Additionally, on their website you can request to have a payload sent to space on New Shepard for research and technology purposes, but fair warning, this requires a lot of paperwork, so serious inquiries only!

Thus far, New Shepard has successfully flown 8 NASA payloads to space, completed 12 test flights, and most recently, it completed its sixth flight reusing the same rocket and capsule, which further emphasizes the importance of reusability to Blue Origin. As previously mentioned, space travel costs a lot of money, but Bezos believes that we can make it cheaper by creating reusable rockets. In fact, next in store for Blue Origin is New Glenn, a heavy-lift launch vehicle named after the first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn. Like New Shepard, New Glenn is designed to carry both research payloads and people, but it is expected to have a lifetime of at least 25 missions, and is twice as big as any existing rocket. Thus far, $2.5 billion has been invested in New Glenn, and its first mission is set to take place in 2021. Of course this is a large sum of money, but when you’re the CEO of Amazon, it’s simple.

Since this year is the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, we can’t help but wonder, when are humans returning to the moon? Well according to the Trump administration, Americans will be back on the moon by the year 2024. In order to help NASA achieve this goal, Jeff Bezos and his company have designed a lunar landing module called Blue Moon. But, Bezos’s plan is not to just go to the moon and come right back. Instead, he envisions a lunar colony as the first step in his greater plan to have humans live in outer space. Blue Moon’s framework is essential to achieving this dream, since the landing module is powered by liquid hydrogen, meaning that it is able to be refueled upon landing, since NASA has confirmed the presence of ice found on the moon. Bezos is so optimistic about humans living in outer space that he envisions humans living in O’Neill Colonies, which were first introduced by American physicist Gerard K. O’Neill. These colonies are basically spinning structures that feature agricultural areas, high speed transportation, and even entire cities, all floating in a giant cylinder in outer space. Bezos has described the climate in these cylinders as like “Maui on it’s best day all year long.” Who wouldn’t want to live in such a place? Well, this doesn’t really matter to anyone reading this right now, since we will be long gone by the time these O’Neill Colonies could even be put into use.

On a brighter note, something that we might be able to witness within our lifetime is humans on Mars! NASA actually plans to have boots on Mars by the 2030s. When it comes to private companies though, Bezos is focused on space tourism and going to the moon, whereas, Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, is more determined to get humans to Mars. Founded in 2002, the goal of SpaceX as stated on their website is to “enable people to live on other planets,” the first of which being Mars. Elon Musk believes that if he could make the cost of flying to Mars equivalent to the cost of buying a $500,000 home in California, then he thinks that there would be enough people willing to buy a ticket, that humans could eventually inhabit Mars. Like Bezos, many of Musk’s aspirations may sound impossible, but we have to remember that at some point in time, humans thought it impossible to put a man on the moon.

But at the end of the day, we must ask ourselves, is the goal to send humans to Mars, or is the goal to colonize Mars? Should we be fixing our own problems here on this planet before we destroy another one? With these questions in mind, one can only wonder, is all of this just a big waste of money? Should we be using the one billion dollar yearly budget that Blue Origin has on something else? Even back when man landed on the moon 50 years ago, there were concerns that the money the U.S. government was spending on space exploration could be better spent. A man named Ralph Abernathy coordinated a group of 500 people at the Kennedy Space Center days before the Apollo 11 launch, as a way to protest the government’s spending on the project, since there were starving children out on the streets. Another reason why people might be hesitant to top companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX making rapid advancements is because there is a possibility that the U.S. government will view these advancements as possible tools of war, like they almost did with the Soviets. But then again, that’s what the Space Force is for, right?

To wrap up this article on a somewhat lighter note, here’s a short list of 10 things you might not have known about the missions to the moon:

1. As a member of the Apollo 14 mission, Alan Shepard became the first man to hit a golf ball on the moon.
2. On the moon, if you were to drop a hammer and a feather at the same time, they would fall to the surface at the same speed.
3. The Apollo 11 crew took remnants of fabric and a small piece of wood from the original Wright Flyer to the moon.
4. Buzz Aldrin took the Holy Communion once Apollo 11 landed on the moon before Armstrong took his famous first step.
5. President Nixon had a statement already written in case the Apollo 11 mission didn’t go as planned, and the astronauts died on the mission.
6. A Jamestown cargo tag from a ship that traveled from England to the New World in 1611 flew to the ISS and back on the 400th anniversary of the colony.
7. The light-saber used by Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi was sent to orbit aboard Space Shuttle Discovery to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the original Star Wars trilogy.
8. Commander Mark Polansky took a teddy bear to the moon that was a replica of one owned by a Holocaust survivor.
9. Astronaut Satoshi Furukawa built a Lego replica of the International Space Station while aboard the International Space Station itself.
10. Astronauts trained for walking on the moon in zero gravity by being suspended sideways and walking on a slanted wall.

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How times change.

It seems just yesterday when Al Gore was being vilified as America’s über-exaggerator for his warning in 2006 of the coming disaster that is climate change.

Although climate change is certainly no laughing matter, Gore certainly could claim to have the last laugh. In the years since Gore first entered the words “inconvenient truth” into our lexicon, the international scientific community has gathered hard data, put that data through state-of-the-art computer models, and concluded that human activity—specifically, our addiction to the burning of fossil fuels—contributes to the climate-warming trends being observed around the globe.

How overwhelming is the consensus? Let’s just say it’s hard to argue away the conclusions of the majority of climate scientists.  Sadly, it looks like we need to come to terms right now with the reality that we’ve already crossed the climate-altering Rubicon.  (Unless, that is, if your reality is the fictional world of FOX News and conservative media, and you take seriously the false claims of congressional climate deniers).  For those inhabiting a political/philosophical home on the far-right shore, propaganda, disinformation, and lies about climate crisis hold sway. Over there, confusion reigns about what’s fact and what’s fiction, much to the detriment of all of us and the difficult policy prescriptions that we should be actively pursuing.

For those of us inhabiting the world of facts, however, and looking for a nonpolitical, objective take on climate change, there’s no better place to look than to NASA. Can we all agree—no matter what our political leanings—that NASA, an agency of the federal government, is no leftie, tree-hugging group under the influence of Al Gore and radical environmentalists?

If we can agree on NASA’s bona fides, then how about visiting the scientists over there to get the facts?  What you’ll find on NASA’s official website is an unequivocal confirmation that 97% of global climate scientists looking at all the studies, computer models, and first-hand observational research data agree that the probable cause of climate-warming trends is human activity.

And NASA provides even more hard evidence right there on its public website.  The website refers to over 200 scientific organizations worldwide that have issued public statements on warming trends and human activity.

Let me repeat that number again: two hundred of the most prestigious scientific organizations in the world.

Ask yourself. When was the last time FOX News invited independent experts on climate science—not scientists and pundits on the payroll of corporate interests—to sit down on one of their quasi-news programs?  Those would be reputable scientists from wonky organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Medical Association, the American Meteorological Society, the American Physical Society, The Geological Society of America, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, or the National Research Council.

The answer is, you won’t find those independent voices shooting the bull with Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly. But wherever or however the deniers derive their beliefs doesn’t matter.  The global climate crisis is real.  It’s happening now. What those of us who choose to live in the real world decide to do with the facts of climate change is what counts.

The first step is clearly in the hands of our media. Media should be, after all, a responsible gatekeeper for the accuracy of the information we get, the form in which we receive our information, and how we process with critical thinking that information.

Edward R. Murrow summed up the vital role of the media not only in his time but in ours when he said, “…To be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.”

With such a solemn responsibility, isn’t it about time journalists and media outlets follow Murrow’s lead and stop giving climate-change deniers a pass and an uncritical forum for their fairy tales? It’s way past time to call out the deniers on their spin and their disregard for scientific fact.

On October 5, 2013, the Los Angeles Times took the lead and did just that. Paul Thornton, editor of the Los Angeles Times’ letters section, set off a firestorm when he announced the paper’s decision to stop publishing letters containing factual inaccuracies about climate change.  Explaining the policy shift, Thornton wrote,

Just last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—a body made up of the world’s top climate scientists—said it was 95% certain that we fossil-fuel-burning humans are driving global warming.  The debate right now isn’t whether this evidence exists (clearly, it does) but what this evidence means for us.

He concluded,

Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published.  Saying “there’s no sign humans have caused climate change” is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.

Now that the Los Angeles Times has broken from the pack, the question is which other newspapers and media outlets will have the courage to follow?

Image information: Carbon dioxide levels in our atmosphere are rising. Both images show the spreading of carbon dioxide around the globe as it follows large-scale patterns of circulation in the atmosphere. The color codes in these two pictures are different in order to account for the carbon dioxide increase from 2003 to 2007. Image credit: NASA/JPL 

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The biggest losers in the Congressional race to be the biggest spending-cutter could be imagination, creativity and ingenuity—elements that are essential to economic recovery and growth.

As American politicians have fallen in love with the notion of spending cuts—not necessarily something that American citizens really want—they view the Federal budget as a target-rich document. They’ll have a hard time cutting the biggies—Social Security, Medicare and the sacrosanct military budget. So they’re looking for low-hanging fruit as way of making a symbolic statement about their commitment to reducing government spending.

Unfortunately, among the programs the deficit hawks see as easy to cut are NASA, the National Endowment for the Arts [NEA], and the National Endowment for the Humanities [NEH].

The problem with defunding or drastically cutting these programs is that, at the heart of each, are curiosity, creativity, imagination and ingenuity.

Goodbye to NASA?

Earlier this year, newly elected Sen. Rand Paul [R-KY] introduced a bill to reduce NASA’s budget by 35 percent–to $13 billion—calling for the agency to step aside and let private industry take over space exploration.

Is private industry a better answer? That’s a fair question. But in terms of return-on-investment of government dollars, let’s remember how many innovations and industries have been spawned by NASA. What about the thousands of kids who became scientists and engineers because they watched a Shuttle launch and dreamed big? While politicians complain about America’s floundering educational system, they’re eager to cut a program that inspired a generation of academic achievement. When we look around and see other countries pulling ahead [whatever that means] in science and math education, how can we discount the value of space exploration as an academic motivator? We hear that, to grow, America needs scientists, engineers and innovators to create new industries and jobs. Yet politicians want to scapegoat NASA and use it as an example of unnecessary spending, when it’s actually a role model for the innovation incubators that they’re looking for. And it’s already here, with a proven track record.

Who needs arts and humanities, anyway?

Similarly, killing the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities is another way to put a chill on imaginative, creative thinking.

In January 2011, the conservative-led Republican Study Committee released a spending-cut report in which it proposed eliminating NEA’s $167.5 million annual budget, as well as the $167.5 million NEH budget. Conservatives have reduced funding and tried to eliminate NEA many times in the past 30 years, sometimes calling the agency’s mission “elitist,” but more frequently objecting to NEA’s support of artists deemed controversial by right-wing and/or religious groups.

What are the arts and humanities, if not role models for critical thinking, intellectual risk-taking, and outside-the-box creativity? And aren’t these the same principles that are often described as success factors for businesses and the American economy?

Somebody in government clearly understood this concept in 1965, when NEA and NEH were established by an act that declared that:

“the study of the humanities require constant dedication and devotion,” and that “while no government can call a great artist or scholar into existence, it is necessary and appropriate for the Federal government to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry but also the material conditions facilitating the release of this creative talent.” The Act also noted, “The world leadership which has come to the United States cannot rest solely upon superior power, wealth, and technology, but must be solidly founded upon worldwide respect and admiration for the Nation’s high qualities as a leader in the realm of ideas and of the spirit.”

Sure, it’s hard to quantify the direct economic benefits of a beautifully executed work of art, a thoughtful essay or an innovative musical composition. But let’s not forget that the arts themselves constitute an industry that employs several million people. But even that is not the main point. By their existence, and through their activities, NEA and NEH institutionalize a value that has driven American success from its earliest days: the intrinsic importance of creativity and imagination.

If we want to be a nation of robotic thinkers, yes-men, and order-takers—a country that looks ahead no further than the next quarter, doesn’t generate any original thinking and never discovers anything new, then we don’t need NASA, NEA and NEH. I’m pretty certain that’s not the America envisioned even by the most zealous deficit hawk—and if it is, they’d never say it publicly. That’s not the conventional American dream touted by so-called patriots. So, here’s some advice to politicians who sincerely want the top-dog, league-leading, American economic powerhouse they bloviate about—and who want to be remembered as the heroes of the American dream: Don’t kill our national imagination. Save the budget axe for something else.

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Recent news:  The space shuttle Atlantis docked at the international space station on May 16, 2010,  after officials decided there would be no need to perform a maneuver to avoid a piece of debris.

This may well have been the last flight of Atlantis. Following this mission it will be kept in working order, to be used as a possible rescue vehicle for one of the few remaining manned space flights.  While risk is still a crucial factor in the manned space program, in some ways, the program appears to be “yesterday’s news.”

Columnist Thomas Friedman has challenged us to launch a green energy technology program to match the intensity of the information technology program that has evolved over the past seventy years.  And he gives us a sound barometer to measure how we’ll know when the energy technology movement is beginning to make a real difference.  It will be when we have failures.  He’s talking about the kind of failures that occurred in the information revolution.  Failure is a reflection of the healthy competition that evolves from Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest.

The ashes and rubble of failed programs and companies in the information revolution litter recent history.  But in many cases, each failure represented someone else’s success.

In the 1950s, the Navy’s Vanguard missile program to launch an unmanned satellite suffered one mishap after another, while the Army’s Redstone program succeeded in launching Explorer 1, an eighteen lb. satellite, into space on January 31, 1958, where it remained for twenty-two years.  The Army’s work was the precursor to NASA’s manned-space program.

On the commercial level, we see today’s winners: Apple, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Sony, Canon, Nikon, Microsoft, and many others.  Friedman asserts that they stand tall and in many cases continue to battle one another because they won the battles with previous competitors.  Some may remember the Commodore 64, which in the early 1980s was considered the class of the personal computing field.  But its operating system could not keep up with the Macintosh OS and Microsoft’s DOS and then Windows.  Prior to the Commodore, we had  the first personal computer, the Radio Shack TRS-80.  Unfortunately for the company, the computer lived up to its nickname, the TRASH-80.

If you were an investor in the 1980s, you were constantly getting tips on this company or that, one of which was going to revolutionize the computer industry.  The low-price stock might be making memory chips, fiber optics, new welding techniques, or the “brains” to the newest device to swipe credit cards.

While we remember tech stocks as being good investments in the 1980s and 1990s, we forget that most of the losers had investors, and they often lost all of their equity in a failed company.

Friedman’s point is surprisingly simple and logical.  Look at the table below and, while you can’t write on your computer screen, think of  how many information technology companies you could list in the left column and how few green energy technology companies your could list in the right column.

The green energy companies are there, they are just hard to find because they’re not that large (you’re not allowed to count a company called ‘BP’ that wants you to think that its initials stand for ‘Beyond Petroleum’).

Friedman takes the analogy between information and clean energy one step further.   I.T. essentially got its start from government.  During World War II,  the U.S., U.K., Germany, Soviet Union, France, and Italy were all working on hi-tech devices, mainly to become weapons of mass destruction or to be used for espionage.  Following the war, the American and Soviet governments put hundreds of billions of dollars into programs that could only succeed if based on information technology.  First the U.S. worked through the military, then NASA, and by giving tax incentives for research and development as well as building an infrastructure for the internet.

Friedman contends that green energy will become successful when it advances so far that we don’t even use the adjective ‘green’ in front of it, because all energy will be assumed to be green.  This phenomenon will happen when the government makes large financial commitments to partner with private entrepreneurs as it did with the information revolution.  Some of the private companies will succeed and make investors wealthy, and others will go by the wayside and leave some investors holding the bag.  But this is how it worked in our last major revolution and how it has to be if we are going to be successful in going green.

If and when a green revolution succeeds, the corporate corpses may include large fossil-fuel energy companies that currently thrive, as well as start-ups that by design or misfortune just didn’t find a niche in the program.  So if you want to see the clean energy program really take off, look for the failures as well as the successes.

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