Space Money

G. Beekman

Why spend money on space?

It’s a common question. People say that, while poverty exists on Earth, we shouldn’t spend money on space. But why single out space?

Look at art, for example. The world’s most expensive painting is The Card Players by Paul Cézanne, which sold for more than US$250 million in 2011. That’s a lot of money just to hang on a wall. According to a March 2013 report by the European Fine Art Foundation, the worldwide market in both art and antiques is worth $60 billion.

But who can afford such expensive works? Only the rich, of course. According to a January 2014 report by Oxfam, the richest 85 people in the world have accumulated as much wealth as the poorest half of the entire population of Earth – a jaw-dropping statistic. In this report, Oxfam pulled no punches. It explains that “the richest undermine democratic processes and drive policies that promote their interests at the expense of everyone else.”

World poverty is a deeply complex issue and not one that will be solved by cancelling space budgets.

But how much do we spend on space?

In 2011/12, the UK’s Space Agency’s budget was a paltry £256 million. However, the UK’s space industry contributes £9.1 billion to the UK economy and directly employs 28,900 people. The bulk of this comes from non-government sources. In other words, space is good business.

A 1997 poll revealed the average American thought NASA received 20% of total US government expenditure. In fact, NASA’s budget is just half a percent; it is the defence budget that gets 20%. The US is the largest military financer in the world, spending some $800 billion dollars on it; NASA gets just $20 billion.

China is the second largest military spender, with a defence budget of $100 billion. Its space budget is just over $1 billion – another tiny figure by comparison. Russia recently ousted the UK to become the third largest military spender in the world, at $65 billion. However, it only spends around $5 billion on space.

Globally, the pattern is the same. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Year Book 2013 shows governments spent $1,700 billion on defence. Euroconsult’s 2012 report Profiles of Government Space Programs shows world governments only spent $40 billion on non-military space programs.

Who says we spend too much on space?

And yet, we’ve been able to land men on the moon, put space stations in orbit around Earth, send probes to all the planets in the solar system and disproved the widely-held 19th Century view that Mars was inhabited.

Just think what we could do with serious funding.

But why should we spend money on space? How does space research benefit mankind? Well, let’s look at defence of the Earth to begin with. According to the Minor Planet Center, there are over half a million asteroids orbiting the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Collisions between asteroids, and perturbations caused by Jupiter’s immense gravitational field, can push these asteroids towards Earth.

Take the events of 15 Feb 2013 over Chelyabinsk, for example. A hunk of space rock about twenty metres in diameter hurtled through the Russian atmosphere at over fifty times the speed of sound. The huge temperatures generated by this meteorite made it glow brighter than the Sun, causing temporary blindness and even radiation burns to some. Many drivers captured the meteorite’s descent via their car dashboard cameras. Thankfully, it exploded while still ‘up in the air.’ Even so, the shock wave knocked people off their feet, caused damage to over 7,000 buildings, and made over 1,200 people seek medical attention, mainly as a result of injuries from flying glass when the shock wave blew in their windows. The largest surviving piece, weighing in at 650 kg, smashed into the ice-covered Lake Chebarkul. Even though the ice was 70 cm thick, this meteorite created a 7 m wide hole in it.

Perhaps the most famous asteroid impact is that of Chicxulub. It is a 180 km wide crater in Mexico and is believed to be the impact that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. This is not the only impact crater on Earth. According to the Earth Impact Database, there are 184 confirmed impact craters across planet Earth. Rocks from outer space, of all shapes and sizes, have collided with Earth throughout its history.

The Moon’s surface, of course, is riddled with impact craters. Not all of them are ancient. On 11 Sept 2013, two of the Moon Impacts Detection and Analysis System project telescopes saw a bright flash on the Moon. This was caused by a hunk of space rock weighing almost half a tonne smashing into it.

If we humans are to survive on Earth, we need to be able to protect ourselves from all the asteroids, comets and other rocky fragments out there. We need space telescopes to map all the known objects and to continue tracking them. Orbits of small objects are not fixed: they move. Indeed, scientists have reported that asteroid 2000 EM26 has disappeared. Now nicknamed Moby Dick, this 270 m wide asteroid was predicted to pass within a few million kilometres of Earth on 18 Feb 2014. But when the telescopes looked, they couldn’t find it. Most likely, something changed its orbit. Where is it now?

This is why we need space telescopes to constantly monitor and track these objects. We also need to invest in space-based systems that we can use to change their orbits. Blowing them up is not an option because the material would still collide with Earth. We need to change the orbit of anything predicted to slam into us. Various ideas for this have been proposed, but much more funding is required to test them out.

Space rocks are not our only danger. Even our own Sun can harm us. Massive eruptions on its surface can send hordes of charged particles to rain down upon Earth. One such storm hit the American continent in 1989. The charged particles brought with them powerful magnetic fields that generated electrical currents in the ground. Charged particles, electricity and magnetism go hand-in-hand. The electricity grid across the province of Quebec, Canada became over-loaded and millions of homes, businesses and trains lost power in a blackout that lasted 12 hours.

It wasn’t just Canada that was affected but they suffered the worst damage. Satellites and the orbiting Space Shuttle Discovery were also impacted due to the charged particles screwing up their electronics. Even automatic garage doors in California opened and closed randomly by themselves, and factories making microchips had to halt production. After the solar storm passed, things returned to normal.

Twenty-five years on from the Quebec Blackout we depend on electronic technology more than ever. For example, the UN’s International Telecoms Union states that there are 6.8 billion mobile phone subscriptions but only 7.2 billion people. At some point during this year, they predict, there will be more mobile phones than humans. eTForecasts (a market research company) report that worldwide PCs in use topped 1.4 billion in 2010 and predict it will be over 2 billion by 2015.

All of these can be damaged by invisible solar storms. These storms and their effects are known as space weather. A number of dedicated satellites already observe this. For example, the are two STEREO satellites that monitor the Sun’s surface and two Van Allen satellites that monitor Earth’s radiation belts. Solar storms impact our radiation belts, which in turn impact Earth.

With enough warning, systems can be powered down to help protect them. But more needs to be done to better understand the mechanisms involved and how best to protect our sensitive equipment. America’s Space Weather Prediction Center reports that $500 million was paid out between 1994 and 1999 in insurance claims “due to on-orbit failures related to space weather” by a spacecraft insurance company. Space weather, as invisible as it may be, has major economic implications.

So defence of the Earth is one of the main reasons we should spend money on space.

Another is that Earth’s resources are running out.  The so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are becoming more middle-class, increasing the already-large demand for minerals such as copper to wire their houses and elements like scandium for use in electronic gadgets.

One idea is to tap Earth’s mantle for further resources but do we really want to build huge factories to suck out Earth’s insides? An alternative is to mine the other bodies in the solar system and leave the Earth intact. Mining asteroids might sound like science fiction but we know that as the molten Earth slowly cooled, all the iron and ‘iron-loving’ metals sank to its centre. When Earth’s surface solidified, there was no ‘gold in them thar hills’ (to quote Mark Twain). But a rain of asteroids early in the solar system’s history brought these precious metals (gold, cobalt, iron, platinum etc.) back to Earth. These metals are crucial to Earth’s economic success and, estimates suggest, will have been depleted by the end of the century.

Two asteroid-mining companies already exist: Planetary Resources, and Deep Space Industries. One of their targets is the iron-nickel class of asteroids. These are rich in the metals that are rare on the surface of Earth. But this is not their only target: even water could be sourced from asteroids, then split into hydrogen and oxygen in a robotic space factory and used to fuel further asteroid mining operations. Earth is not a magical, bottomless bucket. In 2011, the British Geological Survey introduced the ‘risk list,’ a list of elements of economic value where supply is ‘at risk’ due to low abundance, low recycling rates or political issues.

So instead of waiting for more asteroids to fall to Earth – and potentially wiping us out, as they did the dinosaurs – it is better for us to go to the asteroids, either to move them out of harm’s way or to mine them for their precious metallic resources.

Closer to home, our modern daily lives depend on artificial satellites. Only Earth’s best science and technology goes into creating these glorious, orbiting machines. They are used for many purposes, including:

•Communication – TV, telephones, video conferencing; for example, the Russia Today news channel is broadcast to over 100 countries via 22 satellites.

•Navigation – smart phones and ‘satnav’ systems connect to navigation satellites to determine their current location and to navigate; aircraft and ships also use them. America’s GPS system was the first in place but Russia’s GLONASS system is now fully operational; the EU, China and India are all creating their own fleets.

•Weather forecasting – for example, the east coast of India was hit by a cyclone in 1999 that killed 10,000 people; due to advanced warning, a similar cyclone that hit in 2013 killed just 19 people.

•Earth observation – from monitoring of climate change to leaks in oil pipelines, use of satellite data is growing all the time. Cubesats are a revolution in satellite miniaturisation. On 9 Jan 2014 Planet Labs launched 28 of these small devices in just one rocket, transforming forever the field of Earth-imaging.

But inward-pointing satellites are only a small part of the vastness of space. Earth’s atmosphere blocks our view of most of the electromagnetic spectrum but using space-based telescopes and probes potentially gives us access to all the radiation the Universe emits, changing our scientific understandings for ever.

We’ve even discovered water frozen in polar craters on both the Moon and Mercury, and found 2% of Martian dirt is actually frozen water. Does the answer to our own origins lie buried somewhere on Mars?

Only space can tell us who we are and only space can save us from economic ruin and extinction. Instead of asking ‘why do we spend money on space?’ we should be asking ‘why aren’t we spending more money on space?’.

Why aren’t we spending more?