Roger Launius, historien, fin connaisseur de la chose
spatiale – notamment américaine – et auteur de très nombreux
ouvrages, est aussi
bloggeur à ses heures perdues. Or
voilà qu’il vient de reproduire sur son blog une très belle lettre rédigée en
1970 par Ernst Stuhlinger, alors Associate Director for Science au
Marshall
Space Flight Center, à Huntsville, Alabama, en réponse à Sœur Mary qui, s’occupant
des enfants affamés de Zambie en Afrique, s’interroge avec naturel et sincérité sur le caractère raisonnable (
i.e. utile) de la conquête de l’espace. Je reproduis la lettre telle quelle. Elle reste, près de quarante
après, un témoignage éloquent en faveur de l’exploration de l’espace.
Qu’on me permette toutefois une mise en contexte. Tout d’abord,
un des principaux débats agitant la communauté spatiale depuis les origines
concerne effectivement l’intérêt économique qu’il y a à aller dans l’espace.
Pour certains, les vols spatiaux – notamment habités – gaspillent l’argent dont
l’utilisation serait la bienvenue dans d’autres secteurs « terrestres »
(faim dans le monde, environnement, éducation, programmes sociaux, etc.). Pour
d’autres, les bénéfices liés aux activités spatiales (emplois et retombées
technologiques) sont au contraire cruciaux.
Bien entendu, les justifications sont à la fois plus nombreuses et plus profondes. J’ai
moi-même essayé
ici,
ici,
ici
et
là
d’en faire la présentation grossière. Je me promets d’ailleurs d’y revenir. N’en
demeure pas moins que, de ce point de vue, le principal mérite d’Ernst
Stuhlinger est de dépasser cette opposition binaire classique. A noter que
Stuhlinger, né en Allemagne en 1913, a fait partie des
127
scientifiques qui, à la fin de la Deuxième guerre mondiale, ont décidé, avec
Wernher von Braun (1912-1977), d’immigrer aux Etats-Unis. Il y est mort
en 2008 à l’âge de 94
ans.
Dear Sister Mary
Jucunda,
Your letter was one of many which are reaching
me every day, but it has touched me more deeply than all the others because it
came so much from the depths of a searching mind and a compassionate heart. I
will try to answer your question as best as I possibly can.
First, however, I would like to express my
great admiration for you, and for all your many brave sisters, because you are
dedicating your lives to the noblest cause of man: help for his fellowmen who
are in need.
You asked in your letter how I could suggest
the expenditures of billions of dollars for a voyage to Mars, at a time when
many children on this Earth are starving to death. I know that you do not
expect an answer such as “Oh, I did not know that there are children dying from
hunger, but from now on I will desist from any kind of space research until
mankind has solved that problem!” In fact, I have known of famined children
long before I knew that a voyage to the planet Mars is technically feasible. However,
I believe, like many of my friends, that travelling to the Moon and eventually
to Mars and to other planets is a venture which we should undertake now, and I
even believe that this project, in the long run, will contribute more to the
solution of these grave problems we are facing here on Earth than many other
potential projects of help which are debated and discussed year after year, and
which are so extremely slow in yielding tangible results.
Before trying to describe in more detail how
our space program is contributing to the solution of our Earthly problems, I
would like to relate briefly a supposedly true story, which may help support
the argument. About 400 years ago, there lived a count in a small town in
Germany. He was one of the benign counts, and he gave a large part of his
income to the poor in his town. This was much appreciated, because poverty was
abundant during medieval times, and there were epidemics of the plague which
ravaged the country frequently. One day, the count met a strange man. He had a
workbench and little laboratory in his house, and he labored hard during the
daytime so that he could afford a few hours every evening to work in his
laboratory. He ground small lenses from pieces of glass; he mounted the lenses
in tubes, and he used these gadgets to look at very small objects. The count
was particularly fascinated by the tiny creatures that could be observed with
the strong magnification, and which he had never seen before. He invited the
man to move with his laboratory to the castle, to become a member of the
count’s household, and to devote henceforth all his time to the development and
perfection of his optical gadgets as a special employee of the count.
The townspeople, however, became angry when
they realized that the count was wasting his money, as they thought, on a stunt
without purpose. “We are suffering from this plague,” they said, “while he is
paying that man for a useless hobby!” But the count remained firm. “I give you
as much as I can afford,” he said, “but I will also support this man and his
work, because I know that someday something will come out of it!”
Indeed, something very good came out of this
work, and also out of similar work done by others at other places: the
microscope. It is well known that the microscope has contributed more than any
other invention to the progress of medicine, and that the elimination of the
plague and many other contagious diseases from most parts of the world is
largely a result of studies which the microscope made possible.
The count, by retaining some of his spending
money for research and discovery, contributed far more to the relief of human
suffering than he could have contributed by giving all he could possibly spare
to his plague-ridden community.
The situation which we are facing today is
similar in many respects. The President of the United States is spending about
200 billion dollars in his yearly budget. This money goes to health, education,
welfare, urban renewal, highways, transportation, foreign aid, defense,
conservation, science, agriculture and many installations inside and outside
the country. About 1.6 percent of this national budget was allocated to space
exploration this year. The space program includes Project Apollo, and many
other smaller projects in space physics, space astronomy, space biology,
planetary projects, Earth resources projects, and space engineering. To make
this expenditure for the space program possible, the average American taxpayer
with 10,000 dollars income per year is paying about 30 tax dollars for space.
The rest of his income, 9,970 dollars, remains for his subsistence, his
recreation, his savings, his other taxes, and all his other expenditures.
You will probably ask now: “Why don’t you take
5 or 3 or 1 dollar out of the 30 space dollars which the average American
taxpayer is paying, and send these dollars to the hungry children?” To answer
this question, I have to explain briefly how the economy of this country works.
The situation is very similar in other countries. The government consists of a
number of departments (Interior, Justice, Health, Education and Welfare,
Transportation, Defense, and others) and the bureaus (National Science
Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and others). All of
them prepare their yearly budgets according to their assigned missions, and
each of them must defend its budget against extremely severe screening by
congressional committees, and against heavy pressure for economy from the
Bureau of the Budget and the President. When the funds are finally appropriated
by Congress, they can be spent only for the line items specified and approved
in the budget.
The budget of the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration, naturally, can contain only items directly related to
aeronautics and space. If this budget were not approved by Congress, the funds
proposed for it would not be available for something else; they would simply
not be levied from the taxpayer, unless one of the other budgets had obtained
approval for a specific increase which would then absorb the funds not spent
for space. You realize from this brief discourse that support for hungry
children, or rather a support in addition to what the United States is already
contributing to this very worthy cause in the form of foreign aid, can be
obtained only if the appropriate department submits a budget line item for this
purpose, and if this line item is then approved by Congress.
You may ask now whether I personally would be
in favor of such a move by our government. My answer is an emphatic yes.
Indeed, I would not mind at all if my annual taxes were increased by a number
of dollars for the purpose of feeding hungry children, wherever they may live.
I know that all of my friends feel the same
way. However, we could not bring such a program to life merely by desisting
from making plans for voyages to Mars. On the contrary, I even believe that by
working for the space program I can make some contribution to the relief and
eventual solution of such grave problems as poverty and hunger on Earth. Basic
to the hunger problem are two functions: the production of food and the
distribution of food. Food production by agriculture, cattle ranching, ocean
fishing and other large-scale operations is efficient in some parts of the
world, but drastically deficient in many others. For example, large areas of
land could be utilized far better if efficient methods of watershed control,
fertilizer use, weather forecasting, fertility assessment, plantation
programming, field selection, planting habits, timing of cultivation, crop
survey and harvest planning were applied.
The best tool for the improvement of all these
functions, undoubtedly, is the artificial Earth satellite. Circling the globe
at a high altitude, it can screen wide areas of land within a short time; it
can observe and measure a large variety of factors indicating the status and
condition of crops, soil, droughts, rainfall, snow cover, etc., and it can
radio this information to ground stations for appropriate use. It has been
estimated that even a modest system of Earth satellites equipped with Earth
resources, sensors, working within a program for worldwide agricultural
improvements, will increase the yearly crops by an equivalent of many billions
of dollars.
The distribution of the food to the needy is a
completely different problem. The question is not so much one of shipping
volume, it is one of international cooperation. The ruler of a small nation may
feel very uneasy about the prospect of having large quantities of food shipped
into his country by a large nation, simply because he fears that along with the
food there may also be an import of influence and foreign power. Efficient
relief from hunger, I am afraid, will not come before the boundaries between
nations have become less divisive than they are today. I do not believe that
space flight will accomplish this miracle over night. However, the space
program is certainly among the most promising and powerful agents working in
this direction.
Let me only remind you of the recent
near-tragedy of Apollo 13. When the time of the crucial reentry of the
astronauts approached, the Soviet Union discontinued all Russian radio
transmissions in the frequency bands used by the Apollo Project in order to
avoid any possible interference, and Russian ships stationed themselves in the
Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans in case an emergency rescue would become
necessary. Had the astronaut capsule touched down near a Russian ship, the
Russians would undoubtedly have expended as much care and effort in their rescue
as if Russian cosmonauts had returned from a space trip. If Russian space
travelers should ever be in a similar emergency situation, Americans would do
the same without any doubt.
Higher food production through survey and
assessment from orbit, and better food distribution through improved
international relations, are only two examples of how profoundly the space
program will impact life on Earth. I would like to quote two other examples:
stimulation of technological development, and generation of scientific
knowledge.
The requirements for high precision and for
extreme reliability which must be imposed upon the components of a
moon-travelling spacecraft are entirely unprecedented in the history of
engineering. The development of systems which meet these severe requirements
has provided us a unique opportunity to find new material and methods, to
invent better technical systems, to manufacturing procedures, to lengthen the
lifetimes of instruments, and even to discover new laws of nature.
All this newly acquired technical knowledge is
also available for application to Earth-bound technologies. Every year, about a
thousand technical innovations generated in the space program find their ways
into our Earthly technology where they lead to better kitchen appliances and
farm equipment, better sewing machines and radios, better ships and airplanes,
better weather forecasting and storm warning, better communications, better
medical instruments, better utensils and tools for everyday life. Presumably,
you will ask now why we must develop first a life support system for our
moon-travelling astronauts, before we can build a remote-reading sensor system
for heart patients. The answer is simple: significant progress in the solutions
of technical problems is frequently made not by a direct approach, but by first
setting a goal of high challenge which offers a strong motivation for
innovative work, which fires the imagination and spurs men to expend their best
efforts, and which acts as a catalyst by including chains of other reactions.
Spaceflight without any doubt is playing
exactly this role. The voyage to Mars will certainly not be a direct source of
food for the hungry. However, it will lead to so many new technologies and
capabilities that the spin-offs from this project alone will be worth many
times the cost of its implementation.
Besides the need for new technologies, there is
a continuing great need for new basic knowledge in the sciences if we wish to
improve the conditions of human life on Earth. We need more knowledge in
physics and chemistry, in biology and physiology, and very particularly in
medicine to cope with all these problems which threaten man’s life: hunger,
disease, contamination of food and water, pollution of the environment.
We need more young men and women who choose
science as a career and we need better support for those scientists who have
the talent and the determination to engage in fruitful research work.
Challenging research objectives must be available, and sufficient support for
research projects must be provided. Again, the space program with its wonderful
opportunities to engage in truly magnificent research studies of moons and
planets, of physics and astronomy, of biology and medicine is an almost ideal
catalyst which induces the reaction between the motivation for scientific work,
opportunities to observe exciting phenomena of nature, and material support
needed to carry out the research effort.
Among all the activities which are directed,
controlled, and funded by the American government, the space program is
certainly the most visible and probably the most debated activity, although it
consumes only 1.6 percent of the total national budget, and 3 per mille (less
than one-third of 1 percent) of the gross national product. As a stimulant and
catalyst for the development of new technologies, and for research in the basic
sciences, it is unparalleled by any other activity. In this respect, we may
even say that the space program is taking over a function which for three or
four thousand years has been the sad prerogative of wars.
How much human suffering can be avoided if
nations, instead of competing with their bomb-dropping fleets of airplanes and
rockets, compete with their moon-travelling space ships! This competition is
full of promise for brilliant victories, but it leaves no room for the bitter
fate of the vanquished, which breeds nothing but revenge and new wars.
Although our space program seems to lead us
away from our Earth and out toward the moon, the sun, the planets, and the
stars, I believe that none of these celestial objects will find as much
attention and study by space scientists as our Earth. It will become a better
Earth, not only because of all the new technological and scientific knowledge
which we will apply to the betterment of life, but also because we are
developing a far deeper appreciation of our Earth, of life, and of man.
The photograph [voir ci-dessus, et également ici] which I enclose with this letter shows a view of our Earth as seen from
Apollo 8 when it orbited the moon at Christmas, 1968. Of all the many wonderful
results of the space program so far, this picture may be the most important
one. It opened our eyes to the fact that our Earth is a beautiful and most
precious island in an unlimited void, and that there is no other place for us
to live but the thin surface layer of our planet, bordered by the bleak
nothingness of space. Never before did so many people recognize how limited our
Earth really is, and how perilous it would be to tamper with its ecological
balance. Ever since this picture was first published, voices have become louder
and louder warning of the grave problems that confront man in our times:
pollution, hunger, poverty, urban living, food production, water control, overpopulation.
It is certainly not by accident that we begin to see the tremendous tasks
waiting for us at a time when the young space age has provided us the first
good look at our own planet.
Very fortunately though, the space age not only
holds out a mirror in which we can see ourselves, it also provides us with the
technologies, the challenge, the motivation, and even with the optimism to
attack these tasks with confidence. What we learn in our space program, I
believe, is fully supporting what Albert Schweitzer had in mind when he said:
“I am looking at the future with concern, but with good hope.”
My very best wishes will always be with you,
and with your children.
Very sincerely yours,
Ernst Stuhlinger
Associate Director for Science
