Physicist Lawrence Krauss ponders NASA in Wall Street Journal
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0279
Updated 8/8/2011: Theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss acts regularly on his belief that physicists should join civic discussion, as shown by the length of his website’s list of public commentaries. Often he addresses the Wall Street Journal‘s influential readership, as in this pair of op-eds in recent days:
‘The shuttle was a dud but space is still our destiny —NASA failed to deliver its primary goal: cheap human space travel. Next time we need to go farther and learn a lot more’
‘Dark matter, black holes and the first stars —The James Webb Space Telescope is vital for science and should not face the budget axe’
Krauss argues that the space shuttle’s final flight “provides an opportunity to rethink space exploration, and to cut losses from a failed program that has been a colossal waste of resources, time and creative energy,” that the “program failed to live up to its primary goal of providing relatively cheap and efficient human space travel,” and that besides being costly in lives and money, the program “has been boring.” He continues:
A generation that grew up with Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ had hoped that by the dawn of the new millennium we would be regularly vacationing in space, and routinely sending astronauts to boldly go where no man or woman had gone before.
Instead we were treated to regular images of the shuttle visiting a $100 billion space-station boondoggle orbiting no farther from Earth than Washington is to New York. No one except a billionaire or two has ever vacationed in space, and their ‘hotel’ was a cramped, stuffy and at times smelly, white elephant.
Either aboard the shuttle or the International Space Station astronauts have explicitly demonstrated that what we learn from sending people into space is not much more than how to keep them alive up there. The lion’s share of costs associated with sending humans into space is devoted, as it should be, to making sure they survive the voyage. No other significant science has emerged from a generation’s worth of round trips in near-earth orbit.
Nevertheless, Krauss also believes that “the future of the human species is, eventually, in space, and that we will one day colonize other planets.” He calls for “a rational plan, and one that can excite the imagination of the next generation of would-be scientists and explorers.” But he also calls for unmanned space science, and retrospectively questions the use of the shuttle for launch and repair of the Hubble Space Telescope. “The first rovers went to Mars,” he quips, “for what it would cost to make a movie about sending Bruce Willis to Mars.”
This calls to mind his other recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, which begins by comparing the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider with the possible cancellation of the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble‘s planned successor (and named for the late NASA administrator, not the serving Virginia senator). Both cases involve huge sunk costs. Krauss declares that the “cancellation of the James Webb Space Telescope would likely herald the beginning of the end of US leadership in space science—much as cancelling the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993 moved the center of gravity in particle physics definitively to Europe.”
Krauss’s ending hits a compelling point:
The idea of shuttering the [JWST] project is not happening in a vacuum: It is part of an overall reduction in support for NASA. ... Yet when one compares the total cost of the James Webb—likely to be around $7 billion, spent over more than a decade—with the $200 billion price of the Shuttle program and the $100 billion spent on the International Space Station, the telescope’s price seems reasonable. Not only is it the cheapest of the bunch, but it’s the item with the greatest potential to push forward the frontiers of knowledge.
...Whenever I lecture and show a Hubble photo, I can be guaranteed to provoke excitement and awe. One can only imagine what kind of inspiration the next generation will miss without the James Webb in the sky....
UPDATE Does a newspaper’s selection of letters on a given topic sometimes reflect a message from the editors? In response to Lawrence Krauss’s op-ed advocating continued support for the James Webb Space Telescope, the 8 August Wall Street Journal contains two letters under the headline “Webb Telescope Cut Illustrates Entitlement Crowd-Out"—an apt summary of the message of both letters. The first, from an official of the American Enterprise Institute, notes that for years, “conservatives have warned that as the entitlement state grew it would gradually squeeze out all other priorities.” It recommends recognizing “that uncontrolled entitlements are fiscal black holes that must be reformed before government funds will be available to explore the physical ones among the stars.” The second asks what Krauss suggests that taxpayers not fund so that we can finish the JWST, and declares that because we’ll be here “for several billion more years ... we can wait 20 to 30 years to unlock a few more secrets of our distant past.”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are published in ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
