Creativity that reaches for the moon also saves the Earth

The year 1969 was an important one for the chronically dissatisfied. That was the year in which the Apollo 11 mission set humans down for the first time in the silvery dust of Earth’s satellite, allowing the grumblers among us to grouse for 40 years, if not forevermore, that “they can put a man on the moon, but they can’t cure the common cold.”

Or make a ballpoint pen that doesn’t glob. Or dental floss that doesn’t shred. Etc.

And yeah, ballpoint pens still glob, usually on the most important checks and letters I have to write. But it’s also true that the scientific research generated by the space program has resulted in a ridiculously varied collection of new or greatly improved products, from microlasers and breast-biopsy technology to better athletic shoes and enriched baby food.

There are so many of these products and processes and so many people who think funding the space program is the moral equivalent of buying a mink coat with the money from the Salvation Army kettle that NASA has felt obliged to justify its own existence by putting up a page on its website listing all the things it’s developed that benefit everyday people: (http://www.thespaceplace.com/nasa/spinoffs.html)

It’s too bad they’ve had to do this out of defensiveness instead of pride. Back in the ‘60s, everyone was so excited about space exploration that they were even proud of Tang, for god’s sake, a kind of astronaut orange juice that had to be the worst-tasting instant drink since Linus in Peanuts dipped a brown crayon in hot water and called it cocoa.

I remember, as a kid, being thrilled when my father, a doctor employed by a pharmaceutical-research firm, brought home a tiny bottle of the banana-flavored pellets his company had developed to nourish the monkeys sent up in test space-flights. They tasted like something that had been lying on the bottom of the produce bin for three weeks – and could break your teeth. But they were space food!

Forty-five years ago, there was nothing cooler.

This year, the 40th anniversary of the moon landing has revived the debate about the worth of our space research, a debate that has alternately shrunk and expanded America’s space program over the last three decades. A lot of folks still think paying for rocket ships and all-terrain Mars rovers means taking bread and milk from the mouths of starving children. 

And maybe NASA is so underfunded now that it can’t do decent public relations about its own successes. But here’s the message the American public needs to get: Investing our tax money in creative and innovative research is like teaching ourselves to fish. When we do that, we’re funding the gaining of knowledge and the development of skills that will let us make life better for billions of people – not just for a day or two, like handing out food, but permanently.

It’s the same as making a long-term investment, rather than living paycheck to paycheck – we’ll never get out from under unless we do.  

There will always be suffering and want and inefficiency unless we keep underwriting programs that find better means of curing these ills. So we have to keep donating peanut butter and penicillin and water purifiers and working on making even better food and medicines and technologies.

Maybe we’ll end up with a globless pen, too.