Why explore space? 1970 letter to a nun in Africa
Erns Stalinger wrote this letter on May 6, 1970, to sister Mary Jakand, a nun who worked among the starving children of the city of Kabwe in the African country of Zambia, in response to a question about the significance of space exploration. At the time, Dr. Stalinger was Deputy Director for Science at the Marshall Space Flight Center, in Hantsville, Alabama. Touched by the sincerity and concern of Mary, he sent her all his sincere beliefs about the value of space exploration. The eloquent statement of the doctor is still relevant, even after four decades. Born in Germany in 1913, Dr. Stalinger received a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Tuebingen in 1936. He was a member of the German rocket group in Peenemunde and came to the United States in 1946 to work for the US Army in Fort Bliss, Texas. He moved to Hantsville in 1950 and continued to work for the Redstone Arsenal Army until the space flight center was established in 1960. Dr. Stalinger was repeatedly awarded and widely known for his research on propulsion systems. He received an award from the Secretary of Defense (Exceptional Civilian Service Award) for taking part in the launch of Explorer 1, the first US space satellite.
Dear sister Mary Jakand!
')
Your letter was one of many such letters that I receive every day, but it was your letter that especially touched me, as if it came from the depths of the mind in search, and the heart, which has compassion. I will do my best to answer your question.
But first, I want to express my deepest admiration for you, and all the brave sisters who have dedicated their lives to the most noble cause for a person - helping those in need.
In your letter, you asked me how I can justify spending the size of billions of dollars on flights to Mars, while many children on Earth are starving. I know you don’t expect a response like, “Oh, I didn’t know that children are mortally hungry, but from now on I will stop any kind of space research until humanity solves the problem of survival!”. And indeed, in fact, I was already familiar with such children long before I learned that traveling to Mars is possible at all. However, I believe, like many of my friends, that the flight to the moon, and ultimately to Mars and other planets, is up to you - which we must undertake and I even believe in this project, in the long run will help offer more solutions to our earthly problems that we face here on Earth, even more than many other potential projects that are discussed from year to year, and which bring very little tangible results.
Before I try to explain in detail how our space program helps to solve problems on our planet, I would like to briefly tell a supposedly true story, it will greatly help me to argue my point of view. About four hundred years ago, the count lived in a small town in Germany. He was quite positive, one of those who give most of their income to the benefit of the city. This quality was especially valuable at that time, the gloomy middle ages stood in the courtyard, poverty flourished everywhere, and plague epidemics ravaged the country over and over again. One day the count met a strange man who had a workbench and a small laboratory in his house, and this man worked hard all day long to have only a few hours of work in his laboratory. He created small lenses from pieces of glass, connected the lenses to the tube in such a way that he could look at small objects with this device. The count was especially fascinated by the tiny creatures that he observed with a strong increase - organisms never before seen before. He offered to move this man with his laboratory to the castle, become a member of the county servants, and devote all his time to the development and improvement of optical devices.
But city dwellers, however, were outraged by the fact that the count spends, in their opinion, the city’s money on some completely useless things. “We suffer from the plague,” they said, “as long as he pays a man for his useless hobby!” But the count remained with him: “I give you as much as I can afford, but I will support this person and his work anyway! I firmly believe that one day something will come out of it! ”
And indeed, thanks to this work, as well as to many others, an amazing creation came out, familiar to us as a microscope. It is well known that a microscope contributed to the development of progress in medicine like nothing else; the elimination of the plague and many other contagious diseases was largely possible because this optical apparatus was invented.
The count, constantly sponsoring research and development, contributed to alleviating the sufferings of mankind to a much greater degree than if he had simply given all his fortune to the needs of the city.
In our days we are confronted in many ways with a similar situation. The President of the United States spends about two hundred billion dollars a year [more than 2 trillion in 2012], this money goes to health care, education, improving social and living conditions, roads and transport development, foreign aid, defense, environmental protection, science and many others. external and internal expenditure items. About 1.6% of the national budget was spent on space research this year [less than 0.5% in 2012]. The space program includes the Apollo project and many other smaller programs in physics, astronomy, biology, engineering, planetary and other space projects. It would be more obvious to say that out of ten thousand dollars of incomes of the average American taxpayer, approximately only thirty dollars go to the needs of the space program, everything else, all $ 9,970 - for food, rest, savings, taxes and other expenses.
Perhaps you ask, "Why not take five, three, or even one dollar out of these thirty" cosmic "dollars that the average taxpayer pays and not send this money to starving children?" To answer this question, I want to explain how the economy of the United States is organized. This applies to other countries. The government consists of a number of ministries (Interior, Justice, Health, Education and Social Security, Transport, Defense, and others) and a bureau (Academy of Sciences, National Space Agency NASA, and others). Each of them prepares its own annual budget, according to its goals, objectives, according to its mission, and each must protect its budget before an extremely demanding commission and under pressure from the budget bureau and the president. When the funds are finally approved by the Congress, they can be spent only on items of expenditures indicated in the final budget.
The NASA budget, of course, can only contain articles related directly to the space program and space. If this budget has not been approved by Congress, funds intended for this cannot be available for something else, they simply will not be levied from the taxpayer, unless some other budget receives an agreement to increase their expense of money for astronautics. From this brief discourse, you probably already understood that support for starving children, or rather, in addition to foreign aid already provided by the United States, can only be obtained if the relevant department confirms the budget line for this purpose, and Congress then approves it.
You can, however, ask - would I personally agree with this step of our government? My answer is definitely yes. I would not mind if my taxes were raised by a few dollars, which would go to the needs of hungry children, wherever they lived.
Many of my friends think as well. However, we cannot bring this program to life, only at the cost of postponing our program for traveling to Mars. On the contrary, I believe that by working on the space program I will be able to make a certain contribution, and ultimately a solution to such a serious problem as poverty and hunger on Earth. The problem of hunger can be divided into two: food production and its distribution. Food production with the help of agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing and other large-scale methods of production effectively occurs in some parts of the planet and is extremely inefficient in others. For example, large areas of land would be more suitable for these purposes, if there were productive methods of irrigation, fertilizer, weather prediction, fertility assessment, selective selection, and reasonable planning of planting dates, surveys, and harvesting would be used.
A better means of improving all these functions is undoubtedly intelligent space satellites. Being at a high altitude above the planet, they can cover large areas in a short time, observe, measure more indicators, the state of the atmosphere, from rainfall to drought, culture and soil, and then transmit this information for further use. It was estimated that even a modest system of artificial satellites, equipped with special sensors and working on an agricultural improvement program, would increase the annual yield equivalent to billions of dollars.
Distributing food to those in need requires the solution of completely different problems. The question is not so much in the amount of delivery, but in the pooling of efforts. The ruler of a small nation may feel uneasy, receiving large quantities of food from another, larger country, simply because he is afraid of becoming dependent on this help, on the influence of foreign powers. I am afraid that the real solution to the problem of hunger will not come as long as there are as many differences between countries as they are now. I do not believe that space flights will become a miracle that arose in the middle of the night and solve all problems at once. However, the space program is very promising and powerful in relation to the unification of peoples.
Let me remind you of the recent tragedy of Apollo 13. When the time came for the decisive entry of astronauts into the atmosphere, the Soviet Union declared radio silence on the frequencies used in the Apollo project to eliminate any possible interference, and many Russian ships in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans were prepared for emergency and spastic operations. If only a capsule with astronauts touched the water not far from the Russian ship, the crew of the vessel would immediately start rescue with the same attention and zeal that the Russian cosmonauts returned from space flight. Undoubtedly, the Americans would have done just the same if the opposite had happened.
Higher levels of food production due to analysis from orbit, better distribution and delivery of these products through established relations between countries - these two examples show how a space program can improve life on earth. I want to mention two other points: the stimulation of technology development and the acquisition of scientific knowledge.
The requirements of exceptional strength and extreme reliability for the components of a ship traveling to the moon are fulfilled with an unprecedented high level for world engineering. The development of such systems provides us with the opportunity to find a new material or method, discover a qualitatively new technical system, develop procedures, extend the lifetime of tools, and even discover new laws of nature.
All acquired technical knowledge becomes available for embodiment in terrestrial technologies. Every year about a thousand innovations take their origins from the space program and find ways to use them in everyday life: from kitchen appliances and farm equipment, to sewing machines and radio, and to many other things: ships and airplanes, weather forecasts and storm warnings, communications, The latest medical instruments, other accessories of our life. You ask, why should we first develop a life support system for our lunar astronauts, in order to only then get an external sensor for real patients? The answer is simple: significant progress in solving technical problems often does not come from a direct approach, but only after a bold and challenging goal with strong motivation, innovative creative work ignites the imagination and forces people to do the best they can, as a catalyst enhances a chemical reaction.
Space flights no doubt play this role. Traveling to Mars is definitely not a direct source of food for the needy, but it provides an opportunity to come to light by so many technologies that they pay back many times the cost of developing this single project.
In addition, such a flight requires new technologies, it requires new fundamental knowledge, which, if we want, will improve the human condition on earth. We need knowledge in physics and chemistry, in biology and psychology, and especially in medicine, to cope with the problems of hunger, thirst, water pollution and the environment in general.
We need more young people who will choose science as their career; we need people who will help these scientists who have the talent and determination to participate in research work. Difficult tasks must be available for research, must be supported properly. And again, I repeat, the space program has many amazing opportunities to participate in the exploration of the moons and planets, physics and astronomy, biology and medicine, it is an ideal catalyst that combines the motivation to scientific work, the possibility of discovering the phenomenon of nature and get material support for their research. .
Among all activities that are managed and controlled and sponsored by the US government, the space program is possibly the most transparent and widely discussed, despite it takes 1.6% of the national budget and less than 3 of GDP. As a stimulator of the development of new technologies and research in science, this is incomparable with any other activity. Taking this into account, we can even say that the space program has assumed the role that wars have held for three or four thousand years in a row.
How much human suffering can be avoided if, instead of competing strategic bombers and rockets, to compete with ships flying to the moon! This is a competition of promising brilliant victories, victories that do not leave the defeated person a bitter fate, bringing revenge and new wars.
Although our space program seems to lead us far away from the Earth towards the Moon, the Sun, planets and stars, I believe that not a single celestial object deserves the attention that our own planet deserves. The Earth will become the best habitat not only because there will be new technologies that we can apply in life, but also because we increasingly understand the value of our planet, our life, the value of man.
The Earth Rising, one of the most significant images of the Apollo program, was taken in December 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission. This view of our planet from the lunar orbit, transmitted by astronauts after passing through the back of the moon, for the first time in history, became a symbol of the fragility of the planet, combining the gray lifeless color of dead lunar surfaces with the blue and white colors of Earth, where life boils, driven back by the black grandeur of space .
The photo I attach to this letter shows our planet from the Apollo 8. Of all the results of the space program, this picture should be the most important. She opened our eyes to the beauty of our planet, a precious island of life in infinite space. Never before have people imagined what it really is - the size of our planet. In what a dangerous ecological balance is the Earth and how carefully it should be treated. After this photo was first published, the voices became louder and louder, they warned that a person would have to solve many problems: pollution, hunger, poverty, fresh water control, overpopulation. It was definitely not an accident that we began to think about global world problems after the young space program for the first time provided us with a first look from our planet.
Fortunately, space is not only a mirror in which we can see ourselves, these are technologies, discoveries, this is motivation and even optimism - everything needed to solve the impending problems of the size of the planet with confidence. Everything that we learn, everything that we encounter in our space program, I believe, is fully supported by what Alberd Schweizer thought when he once said: "I look to the future with anxiety, but with hope."
I will always wish the best to you and your children.
Yours sincerely,
Ernst Stalinger,
Deputy Director for Science.
Dear sister Mary Jakand!
')
Your letter was one of many such letters that I receive every day, but it was your letter that especially touched me, as if it came from the depths of the mind in search, and the heart, which has compassion. I will do my best to answer your question.
But first, I want to express my deepest admiration for you, and all the brave sisters who have dedicated their lives to the most noble cause for a person - helping those in need.
In your letter, you asked me how I can justify spending the size of billions of dollars on flights to Mars, while many children on Earth are starving. I know you don’t expect a response like, “Oh, I didn’t know that children are mortally hungry, but from now on I will stop any kind of space research until humanity solves the problem of survival!”. And indeed, in fact, I was already familiar with such children long before I learned that traveling to Mars is possible at all. However, I believe, like many of my friends, that the flight to the moon, and ultimately to Mars and other planets, is up to you - which we must undertake and I even believe in this project, in the long run will help offer more solutions to our earthly problems that we face here on Earth, even more than many other potential projects that are discussed from year to year, and which bring very little tangible results.
Before I try to explain in detail how our space program helps to solve problems on our planet, I would like to briefly tell a supposedly true story, it will greatly help me to argue my point of view. About four hundred years ago, the count lived in a small town in Germany. He was quite positive, one of those who give most of their income to the benefit of the city. This quality was especially valuable at that time, the gloomy middle ages stood in the courtyard, poverty flourished everywhere, and plague epidemics ravaged the country over and over again. One day the count met a strange man who had a workbench and a small laboratory in his house, and this man worked hard all day long to have only a few hours of work in his laboratory. He created small lenses from pieces of glass, connected the lenses to the tube in such a way that he could look at small objects with this device. The count was especially fascinated by the tiny creatures that he observed with a strong increase - organisms never before seen before. He offered to move this man with his laboratory to the castle, become a member of the county servants, and devote all his time to the development and improvement of optical devices.
But city dwellers, however, were outraged by the fact that the count spends, in their opinion, the city’s money on some completely useless things. “We suffer from the plague,” they said, “as long as he pays a man for his useless hobby!” But the count remained with him: “I give you as much as I can afford, but I will support this person and his work anyway! I firmly believe that one day something will come out of it! ”
And indeed, thanks to this work, as well as to many others, an amazing creation came out, familiar to us as a microscope. It is well known that a microscope contributed to the development of progress in medicine like nothing else; the elimination of the plague and many other contagious diseases was largely possible because this optical apparatus was invented.
The count, constantly sponsoring research and development, contributed to alleviating the sufferings of mankind to a much greater degree than if he had simply given all his fortune to the needs of the city.
In our days we are confronted in many ways with a similar situation. The President of the United States spends about two hundred billion dollars a year [more than 2 trillion in 2012], this money goes to health care, education, improving social and living conditions, roads and transport development, foreign aid, defense, environmental protection, science and many others. external and internal expenditure items. About 1.6% of the national budget was spent on space research this year [less than 0.5% in 2012]. The space program includes the Apollo project and many other smaller programs in physics, astronomy, biology, engineering, planetary and other space projects. It would be more obvious to say that out of ten thousand dollars of incomes of the average American taxpayer, approximately only thirty dollars go to the needs of the space program, everything else, all $ 9,970 - for food, rest, savings, taxes and other expenses.
Perhaps you ask, "Why not take five, three, or even one dollar out of these thirty" cosmic "dollars that the average taxpayer pays and not send this money to starving children?" To answer this question, I want to explain how the economy of the United States is organized. This applies to other countries. The government consists of a number of ministries (Interior, Justice, Health, Education and Social Security, Transport, Defense, and others) and a bureau (Academy of Sciences, National Space Agency NASA, and others). Each of them prepares its own annual budget, according to its goals, objectives, according to its mission, and each must protect its budget before an extremely demanding commission and under pressure from the budget bureau and the president. When the funds are finally approved by the Congress, they can be spent only on items of expenditures indicated in the final budget.
The NASA budget, of course, can only contain articles related directly to the space program and space. If this budget has not been approved by Congress, funds intended for this cannot be available for something else, they simply will not be levied from the taxpayer, unless some other budget receives an agreement to increase their expense of money for astronautics. From this brief discourse, you probably already understood that support for starving children, or rather, in addition to foreign aid already provided by the United States, can only be obtained if the relevant department confirms the budget line for this purpose, and Congress then approves it.
You can, however, ask - would I personally agree with this step of our government? My answer is definitely yes. I would not mind if my taxes were raised by a few dollars, which would go to the needs of hungry children, wherever they lived.
Many of my friends think as well. However, we cannot bring this program to life, only at the cost of postponing our program for traveling to Mars. On the contrary, I believe that by working on the space program I will be able to make a certain contribution, and ultimately a solution to such a serious problem as poverty and hunger on Earth. The problem of hunger can be divided into two: food production and its distribution. Food production with the help of agriculture, animal husbandry, fishing and other large-scale methods of production effectively occurs in some parts of the planet and is extremely inefficient in others. For example, large areas of land would be more suitable for these purposes, if there were productive methods of irrigation, fertilizer, weather prediction, fertility assessment, selective selection, and reasonable planning of planting dates, surveys, and harvesting would be used.
A better means of improving all these functions is undoubtedly intelligent space satellites. Being at a high altitude above the planet, they can cover large areas in a short time, observe, measure more indicators, the state of the atmosphere, from rainfall to drought, culture and soil, and then transmit this information for further use. It was estimated that even a modest system of artificial satellites, equipped with special sensors and working on an agricultural improvement program, would increase the annual yield equivalent to billions of dollars.
Distributing food to those in need requires the solution of completely different problems. The question is not so much in the amount of delivery, but in the pooling of efforts. The ruler of a small nation may feel uneasy, receiving large quantities of food from another, larger country, simply because he is afraid of becoming dependent on this help, on the influence of foreign powers. I am afraid that the real solution to the problem of hunger will not come as long as there are as many differences between countries as they are now. I do not believe that space flights will become a miracle that arose in the middle of the night and solve all problems at once. However, the space program is very promising and powerful in relation to the unification of peoples.
Let me remind you of the recent tragedy of Apollo 13. When the time came for the decisive entry of astronauts into the atmosphere, the Soviet Union declared radio silence on the frequencies used in the Apollo project to eliminate any possible interference, and many Russian ships in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans were prepared for emergency and spastic operations. If only a capsule with astronauts touched the water not far from the Russian ship, the crew of the vessel would immediately start rescue with the same attention and zeal that the Russian cosmonauts returned from space flight. Undoubtedly, the Americans would have done just the same if the opposite had happened.
Higher levels of food production due to analysis from orbit, better distribution and delivery of these products through established relations between countries - these two examples show how a space program can improve life on earth. I want to mention two other points: the stimulation of technology development and the acquisition of scientific knowledge.
The requirements of exceptional strength and extreme reliability for the components of a ship traveling to the moon are fulfilled with an unprecedented high level for world engineering. The development of such systems provides us with the opportunity to find a new material or method, discover a qualitatively new technical system, develop procedures, extend the lifetime of tools, and even discover new laws of nature.
All acquired technical knowledge becomes available for embodiment in terrestrial technologies. Every year about a thousand innovations take their origins from the space program and find ways to use them in everyday life: from kitchen appliances and farm equipment, to sewing machines and radio, and to many other things: ships and airplanes, weather forecasts and storm warnings, communications, The latest medical instruments, other accessories of our life. You ask, why should we first develop a life support system for our lunar astronauts, in order to only then get an external sensor for real patients? The answer is simple: significant progress in solving technical problems often does not come from a direct approach, but only after a bold and challenging goal with strong motivation, innovative creative work ignites the imagination and forces people to do the best they can, as a catalyst enhances a chemical reaction.
Space flights no doubt play this role. Traveling to Mars is definitely not a direct source of food for the needy, but it provides an opportunity to come to light by so many technologies that they pay back many times the cost of developing this single project.
In addition, such a flight requires new technologies, it requires new fundamental knowledge, which, if we want, will improve the human condition on earth. We need knowledge in physics and chemistry, in biology and psychology, and especially in medicine, to cope with the problems of hunger, thirst, water pollution and the environment in general.
We need more young people who will choose science as their career; we need people who will help these scientists who have the talent and determination to participate in research work. Difficult tasks must be available for research, must be supported properly. And again, I repeat, the space program has many amazing opportunities to participate in the exploration of the moons and planets, physics and astronomy, biology and medicine, it is an ideal catalyst that combines the motivation to scientific work, the possibility of discovering the phenomenon of nature and get material support for their research. .
Among all activities that are managed and controlled and sponsored by the US government, the space program is possibly the most transparent and widely discussed, despite it takes 1.6% of the national budget and less than 3 of GDP. As a stimulator of the development of new technologies and research in science, this is incomparable with any other activity. Taking this into account, we can even say that the space program has assumed the role that wars have held for three or four thousand years in a row.
How much human suffering can be avoided if, instead of competing strategic bombers and rockets, to compete with ships flying to the moon! This is a competition of promising brilliant victories, victories that do not leave the defeated person a bitter fate, bringing revenge and new wars.
Although our space program seems to lead us far away from the Earth towards the Moon, the Sun, planets and stars, I believe that not a single celestial object deserves the attention that our own planet deserves. The Earth will become the best habitat not only because there will be new technologies that we can apply in life, but also because we increasingly understand the value of our planet, our life, the value of man.
The Earth Rising, one of the most significant images of the Apollo program, was taken in December 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission. This view of our planet from the lunar orbit, transmitted by astronauts after passing through the back of the moon, for the first time in history, became a symbol of the fragility of the planet, combining the gray lifeless color of dead lunar surfaces with the blue and white colors of Earth, where life boils, driven back by the black grandeur of space .
The photo I attach to this letter shows our planet from the Apollo 8. Of all the results of the space program, this picture should be the most important. She opened our eyes to the beauty of our planet, a precious island of life in infinite space. Never before have people imagined what it really is - the size of our planet. In what a dangerous ecological balance is the Earth and how carefully it should be treated. After this photo was first published, the voices became louder and louder, they warned that a person would have to solve many problems: pollution, hunger, poverty, fresh water control, overpopulation. It was definitely not an accident that we began to think about global world problems after the young space program for the first time provided us with a first look from our planet.
Fortunately, space is not only a mirror in which we can see ourselves, these are technologies, discoveries, this is motivation and even optimism - everything needed to solve the impending problems of the size of the planet with confidence. Everything that we learn, everything that we encounter in our space program, I believe, is fully supported by what Alberd Schweizer thought when he once said: "I look to the future with anxiety, but with hope."
I will always wish the best to you and your children.
Yours sincerely,
Ernst Stalinger,
Deputy Director for Science.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/149493/
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