Reason的December 2022目录

AFTER THE RUSSIAN invasion of Ukraine and the Western sanctions that followed, Dmitry Rogozin, former head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, signaled a looming end to the U.S.-Russia space partnership. “If you block cooperation with us,” he tweeted in February, “who will save the ISS [International Space Station] from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or Europe?” Elon Musk answered that call, replying with the SpaceX logo. Private vessels can in fact do the job of Russia’s Soyuz rockets. Terrestrial skirmishes no longer have to jeopardize cosmic exploration when companies like SpaceX can take astronauts to the ISS. That’s why Russia’s August announcement that it will withdraw from the ISS after 2024—though it has since floated 2028 as the departure date—was of little concern. Who needs…

IS SPACE MORE awesome than ever, now that we’ve walked on the moon and beheld the stunning photos transmitted by the James Webb telescope? Or is the night sky, thanks to modernity, more meh? In particular, do kids find the universe more meh than the metaverse? Once nudged to consider the cosmos, even jaded kids can be gobsmacked. “The things my students are most interested in are things that make them feel small,” says Abby Morton, a high school astronomy teacher in a working-class Boston suburb. “They love anything that gives them context.” During class, Morton hands out palmsized diagrams of the solar system. If the solar system were that big, she asks her students, how big would the Milky Way be? “Bigger than the football field!” they venture, or…

SEVERAL INFLUENTIAL PHILOSOPHERS and environmentalist thinkers argue that terraforming Mars and other planets, making them suitable for humans and other Earth life, would be immoral. As we near a day when terraforming is actually possible, the arguments against it are worth reviewing and rebutting. “Trying to change whole planets to suit our ends is arrogant vandalism,” Monash University philosopher Robert Sparrow asserts in a 1999 essay, saying the desire to do so reflects “aesthetic insensitivity and hubris.” Sparrow maintains that “we must show that we are capable of looking after our current home before we could claim to have any place on another.” In a special 2019 issue of the academic journal Futures, neuroscientist Lori Marino likewise claims that “our species is not capable of living on any planet sustainably.”…

DISPLAYED NEAR A triceratops skull in a small gallery in Cambridge, England, you can find a bit of moon rock on sale for just under $40,000—or you could have found it for sale, if only you’d arrived sooner. A red “sold” sticker is attached to the label that identifies the rock as a “lunar sphere.” Never mind, you think—there’s plenty more where that came from. It’s not as simple as that. That space rock represents a rare opportunity, similar to a vegetarian making a moral exception for roadkill. It wasn’t deliberately extracted from the moon by someone claiming it for themself or planning to sell it to you. Something randomly bashed into the moon approximately 4.5 billion years ago, and a particular bit of moon debris got knocked loose and landed…

ASTRONAUT ALAN SHEPARD was the first space athlete. On the Apollo 14 mission in 1971, at the end of a 4.5-hour moonwalk, Shepard took a lunar sampling device modified with a six-iron club head and hit two golf balls. According to a 2021 photo analysis, Shepard’s first ball went 25 yards. The second set a record for longest golf shot on the moon: 40 yards. These are paltry distances compared to those seen in Earth golf, partly because Shepard’s stiff spacesuit allowed him to swing with just one hand. Yet more than 50 years later, his record still stands. In 2022, at least one organization is taking another swing at space sports. In July, the Space Games Federation announced five winners of a competition that invited people to pitch sports…

THE LAST SUCCESSFUL cavalry charge in military history took place in Poland on March 1, 1945—more than a decade before the first man-made object would exit Earth’s atmosphere. So it might come as a surprise to learn that the U.S. Space Force—the sixth and newest branch of the military, created by President Donald Trump in 2019—has a stable of decidedly earthbound “military working horses” at the Vandenberg Space Force Base on California’s Pacific Coast. That makes about as much sense as anything else connected to the Space Force, which will cost taxpayers a little more than $18 billion this year. For that kind of cash, the horses should at least get to wear jetpacks. The Space Force has always been something of a joke. Unfortunately, it is now a very…

IN PLACE OF life insurance, the astronauts who landed on the moon left behind auto-graphed envelope covers that their loved ones could sell if they died in space. Half a century later, the so-called Apollo insurance covers produced for missions 11 through 16 are coveted collector’s items, and actual liability insurance for space travel is a product slowly coming into its own. Insuring space technology is now close to standard. In 2019, The Aerospace Corporation researchers Lindsay Chaney and Nicholas Hirano noted that in the prior year “roughly two-thirds of launched satellites globally carried some form of insurance.” But insuring private space travelers is as new as, well, private space travel. The American travel insurance company Battleface began offering space travel insurance underwritten by Lloyd’s of London in 2021. Some…

Getting off-planet is finally getting cheap. For decades, the only way to reach low Earth orbit (LEO) was on a wildly expensive, overbooked, and unreliable government rocket. But since independent companies have moved into the sector, improvements in technology and business models have driven down per-kilogram launch costs to a tiny fraction of what they were in the heyday of Apollo. Sending an ant farm to space on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, for example, costs a hair over 2 percent of the price to send the same science project up with the space shuttle program. Private space companies have also democratized space access beyond a tiny handful of government-selected projects and people, and in so doing paved the way for innovation. The calculus about whether to experiment with new technology, whether…

IN TRUTH, DIPPIN’ Dots are neither space-age (they were invented in 1988) nor space-safe (see page 76 for the skinny on what kind of ice cream astronauts actually eat). But many Americans nonetheless associate the “ice cream of the future” with Apollo-era optimism about the life-changing potential of new technology. Though they never caught on in the mass market, there is one way Dippin’ Dots have delivered on their futuristic promise: The company’s innovation of ultra-low-temperature freezers for transporting its ice cream pellets enabled it to consult with Pfizer on how to keep COVID-19 vaccines stable during transit.…

IT TURNS OUT that breaking free of Earth’s gravity is a lot easier than breaking free of the regulatory state. This summer, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a 183-page report describing more than 75 actions that SpaceX has to take before launching Starship spacecraft from its launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas. That document is brief compared to the nearly 400-page environmental impact statement that the FAA issued regarding the same launchpad when SpaceX first acquired the site in 2012. Both reports were mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). That 1970 law requires that government agencies study the environmental impact of their actions, whether they are allowing construction of a new highway, permitting a new coal mine, or greenlighting a rocket launch. Over the years, the law has morphed…

IF THE VAST potential of outer space excites you but the cost of exploring it does not, The End of Astronauts is for you. The book imagines a future where frugal humans can have their cosmic cake and eat it too—as long as they don’t mind robot bakers. Notwithstanding their provocative title, science writer Donald Goldsmith and astronomer Martin Rees are not pessimistic about or opposed to space exploration. They just think robots should do most of the work, because robots are less needy than people, gentler on extraterrestrial ecosystems, and cheaper. In keeping with their preference for cold machines, the authors are unmoved by the tautological romanticism that says we should go to space in order to go to space. They wave off President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1962…

In episode 15 of The Simpsons’ fifth season, “Deep Space Homer,” NASA decides to send an average Joe to space in order to boost its rocket launch ratings. The agency picks goofy family patriarch Homer Simpson. Predictably, Homer’s indomitable appetite and dumb willfulness cause chaos on the spacecraft, nearly destroying it after his contraband bag of potato chips and a run-in with an ant farm scuttle the shuttle’s electronics. There isn’t much comedy potential in killing off Homer Simpson, so Homer ultimately manages to save his fellow astronauts as cluelessly as he doomed them. After narrowly avoiding disaster—and getting a charming James Taylor cameo—Buzz Aldrin declares Homer a “hero.” The episode aired only eight years after the Challenger disaster, the real-world NASA’s catastrophic attempt to send an average person—social studies…

In 1998, NASA spent $125 million on the Mars Climate Orbiter, which was supposed to report back weather and temperature conditions on Mars and search for possible water. The team that calculated the probe’s navigation used metric measurements, while the team that actually designed and built it used the English system. The miscalculations caused by the confusion in measurement systems caused the orbiter to fly too close to Mars and burn up in the atmosphere. In August, a booster rocket used to launch a Chinese module into space as part of the country’s construction of a space station landed in the Indian Ocean 35 miles away from the Philippines. China didn’t provide any information to the public or other countries about the booster’s pending descent. It wasn’t the first time…

FOLLOWING 11 YEARS in which the space agency has had no launch capability of its own, NASA will soon attempt to fly its huge Space Launch System (SLS) booster for the first time. A few minutes after liftoff, the Orion spacecraft will separate from the rocket and zip into orbit around the moon for more than a month. No astronauts will be on board this much delayed initial flight. But on later flights, some will. NASA has heavily promoted this first Artemis mission as a return to human moon missions. Because Artemis superficially resembles the Apollo Program, it would be easy to dismiss it as a mere rehash. The SLS looks a lot like the Saturn V that launched six Apollo missions to the surface of the moon. And while…

ON FEBRUARY 6, 2018, I was sitting in the American Airlines Admirals Club at the Austin–Bergstrom International Airport, getting a snack prior to boarding a flight. CNN was playing on the club’s large TV screens. When I looked up, I happened to see blastoff video of the first SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, capable of putting much larger pay-loads into orbit than the workhorse Falcon 9. That first launch was the one that sent into a solar orbit a Tesla convertible with a dummy astronaut sitting behind the wheel. A bit later, when I looked up again, I saw two of the three Falcon first-stage boosters come in for perfect vertical landings at Cape Canaveral. I confess I had tears in my eyes, thinking, “Robert Heinlein, you should be alive to…

STATISTICALLY, AMERICANS LOVE space. Anecdotally, they hate it when billionaires go there. Majorities of all parties, genders, and geographies tell pollsters they support U.S. missions to the moon and Mars, and three-quarters say that the effort to land the first men on the moon was worth it. But last year, when the big three spacefaring billionaires—Virgin’s Richard Branson, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Tesla’s Elon Musk—managed successful manned missions in rapid succession, Twitter (and Congress) were bursting with rage. Every corner of the internet was filled with the same hot takes. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) made a choleric announcement, for example, that “it’s time to tax the billionaires” because “here on Earth, in the richest country on the planet, half our people live paycheck to paycheck, people are struggling to feed…

THE FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS Commission (FCC) has transformed significantly since its birth, taking on new powers and responsibilities as technology evolves. But one thing long remained the same: the agency’s New Deal–era official seal, virtually unchanged since the FCC was established in 1934. The seal featured bright red characters spelling the commission’s name on a field of blue, while a bald eagle flew over telegraph lines in the center, clutching lightning bolts in its claws. In 2020, the FCC announced an internal contest to design a new seal. The winner, submitted by the branding strategy consultant Umasankar Arumugam, included a new element right in the center: Emblazoned atop a shield clutched by an eagle, a tiny satellite hangs in the starry sky. The change was symbolic, but it reflected something profound.…

“WHEN WE LOOK to the future, there is a vast territory that civilization might expand into: space,” the Oxford philosopher William MacAskill observes in What We Owe The Future. “There are tens of billions of other stars across our galaxy, and billions of galaxies are accessible to us.” MacAskill is a founder of the effective altruism movement, which encourages philanthropists to use evidence and reason to direct their time and money in ways that help others as much as possible. Critics claim this amounts to little more than urging people to “do good well.” After all, no one wants to back ineffective altruism. That complaint seems too harsh. The world is littered with well-intentioned programs that squandered vast resources while doing little to improve the circumstances of the people they…