Former US President Barack Obama had a message for the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the super-rich of the world. Speaking at a renewable energy conference during the recent 2024 POwR.Earth Summit in Paris, Obama criticised Silicon Valley tycoons who are building spaceships for engaging in costly and ambitious plans to colonise the solar system while we are staring at a bleak future for the Earth due to degrading living space.
Elon Musk, for example, is reported to have launched his aerospace company, SpaceX with an investment of around $100 million. And Jeff Bezos may have invested between $7.5 billion and $20 billion in his aerospace company, Blue Origin. Unlike Elon Musk, who is targeting the human colonisation of Mars, Bezos wants to explore the potential of space stations that can be converted into large space stations near Earth. He visualise “a trillion humans living in the solar system”, who could opt to visit the Earth on holiday.
The former US president in the Paris meeting said, “But when I hear some of the people talk about the plan to colonise Mars because the earth’s environment may become so degraded that it becomes unlivable, I look at them like, what are you talking about?” He continued, “I would rather us invest in taking care of this planet here”. He said that space exploration should be pursued for gathering knowledge and discovery rather than creating new living space for humanity. “We were designed for this place, and it would be good if we kept this place in a way that’s liveable,” he concluded.
It is also appropriate here to point out that Barack Obama should also have been critical of the political class to which he belongs. The fact is that many rich countries’ political leadership is equally megalomaniacal in promoting human spaceflight programmes. Politicians who typically baulk when asked to invest in climate-change mitigation or fundamental research jump at the chance to release the purse strings for spaceflight – even if they are of dubious relevance.
A case in point: the ‘space command’, which the US, China, and India, are currently engaged in setting up. As a result of such showmanship, we are militarising space in earnest. If taken to its logical conclusion, this will further damage a world already divided along religious, racial, class and caste lines. Remembering that India has been an active votary of the peaceful use of outer space is beneficial. Back in 1968, Vikram Sarabhai, then chairman of The Indian National Committee of Space Research, was the scientific chairman of the first UN Conference on the peaceful use of outer space.
The Government of India invested more than Rs 10,000 crore for the country’s first human spaceflight programme, to be possibly fulfilled in July 2024. Called Gaganyaan, the project is part of India’s efforts to portray itself as a global space power or at least place itself on par with China. Under this project, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) plans to send three Indian astronauts to low-Earth orbit for a little less than a week and return them safely. When such space initiatives are announced, the fundamental question should revolve around their overall rationale and expected scientific outcome. One such question is of priorities: is it worth investing in a programme that may not be able to produce any concrete scientific benefits?
Like the Mars Orbital and Chandrayaan missions, besides the technology development, what do we hope to achieve in terms of new insights other than being a flag-waving exercise? As pointed out by Arup Dasgupta, former deputy director of the Space Applications Centre, ISRO, in an article in The Wire of March 2019, it is moot as to why India did not join the International Space Station programme if it was also committed to an ‘Indian in space’ programme.
Also read: ISRO Doesn’t Have a Satisfactory Answer to Why It Wants to Put Indians in Space
The debates in the West mainly revolve around the point that the survival of humanity depends on expanding beyond the confines of our planet, which Jeff Bezos repeats in response to Obama’s critique. The celebrated physicist the late Steven Weinberg, also a well-known science communicator in his book, Third Thoughts (2018), is dismissive of such arguments.
He says, “Manned spaceflight is a spectator sport, which can be exciting for spectators, but this is not the sort of excitement that seems to lead to anything serious.” Rather than from human space flights. Much of the breakthroughs on the origin and evolution of the universe have all been derived from data generated by space-based observatories like the Cosmic Background Explorer and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. The newly constructed Simons Observatory in the Atacama desert in Chile will now add more observations on the early universe.
The Hubble space telescope belongs in this league, as the most significant space-based observatory, now succeeded by the James Webb Space Telescope. Robotic missions – like the Curiosity rover on Mars, the Yutu rover on the Moon, JUNO around Jupiter, and the Hayabusa 2 probe at the Ryugu asteroid – are expanding our horizons. After a seven-year round trip, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx brought rock samples to Earth on 24 September 2023 from an asteroid named Bennu—billions of kilometres from Earth.
Lori Garver, a former deputy administrator of NASA, wrote a piece titled “Forget New Crewed Missions in Space. NASA Should Focus on Saving Earth” in The Washington Post dated 18 July 2019: “NASA remains one of the most revered and valuable brands in the world, and the agency is at its best when given a purpose. But the public doesn’t understand the purpose of spending massive amounts of money to send a few astronauts to the moon or Mars. Are we in another race, and if so, is this the most valuable display of our scientific and technological leadership? If science is the rationale, we can send robots for pennies on the dollar”.
Consider the US National Academy of Sciences’ decadal strategy for Earth Science and Applications from Space (ESAS). For example, ESAS 2017 declared that NASA should prioritise the study of the global hydrological cycle; the distribution and movement of mass between oceans, ice sheets, groundwater and the atmosphere; and changes in surface biology and geology.
Since its humble beginnings in Thumba, a small hamlet near Thiruvananthapuram, in 1963, ISRO has also made commendable contributions, including achievements in communications and remote sensing. We must also ask what the future priorities of our publicly funded space science and technology initiatives are and the science thereof. The wish list can include targets to develop comprehensive Earth observation systems and build linkages to higher education centres in the country that could then conduct research based on the data obtained from Earth and planetary observation systems.
Sending humans to space without an overarching vision to save our future will end up as a mere flag-waving show. The space surrounding the Earth is now becoming a junkyard with defunct satellites and metal debris posing a threat to newly launched space vehicles.
Barack Obama’s caveat needs to be discussed at a global level in the backdrop of the failure to manage outer space as a commons. ‘Cosmonaut Rakesh Sharma, the first Indian to make a trip to space said in a recent interview, “Let us not build hell on far-off planet”.
C.P. Rajendran is an adjunct professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru.