The Moon, Mars, or Stay Home?

This coming Saturday marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first landing of humans on the moon.  I remember staying up late in my bathrobe and watching the blurry images on our old black-and-white tube-model TV as Neil Armstrong first set foot on the dusty surface.  I was no more moonstruck than most fifteen-year-olds were at the time.  I enjoyed the attention that engineers and high technology were getting as a part of the space program.  But the geopolitical forces that led up to the space race in the first place and the reasons why the U. S. government was spending so much money on it were things I was almost completely ignorant of. 

NASA is still very much with us, though almost a shadow of its 1960s self in terms of its percentage of the federal budget.  The questions of whether and how to spend the many billions of dollars it would cost to either return to the moon with manned spaceflights, or eventually go beyond the moon to Mars, will inevitably rise as we look back on what turned out to be a basically one-trick achievement.  This is not to belittle the incredibly complex and, overall, well-executed program that took men to the moon.  And if you want to connect the dots that go from the lunar landings to the Star Wars research initiatives to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, you can view the Apollo program as the most successful battle in the war against global communism, a war that the West won without starting a nuclear conflict. 

But all that is history, and now the world faces the question of what to do next in space.  The answer depends on which country you ask.

China makes no secret of the fact that they want to land Chinese citizens on the moon and establish a permanently-staffed lunar base.  That is also the goal of one version of plans that NASA has been discussing.  According to an article in Physics Today, during the Obama administration NASA examined the costs associated with setting up a manned lunar base:  $60 to $80 billion.  Faced with such a price tag, the agency instead proposed a plan involving lunar orbiters, landing on an asteroid, and eventually getting to Mars, but it attracted little support and became a dead letter.

More recently, Vice President Pence announced plans to land both men and women on the moon by 2024, but Congress refused to add the $1.6 billion needed for NASA to start planning for such an early date, so it looks like the political climate is more of a problem than any strictly technical issues.

As the barnacles of bureaucracy keep accreting on the U. S. ship of state, achievements of the past look even more impressive than they did at the time.  Taking the technology of 1961, when many if not most electronic systems used vacuum tubes, and moving it forward to the point that we landed men on the moon and got them back safely in only two Presidential election cycles, was truly a stunning achievement. 

But the country was more unified then, and nations that are deeply divided have problems uniting around any goal that isn't clearly for immediate self-preservation.  Nevertheless, it's possible that younger people could unite around a space program that manages to establish a permanent outpost on another planet.

In my work as an educator at the college level, I run across students who, despite their precociously mature and somewhat cynical attitudes, show their support for space efforts by their desire to work for bold, exciting companies like SpaceX or Blue Origin, the Jeff-Bezos-funded space firm.  I suppose it's the latest version of the pioneering spirit that led adventurous Swedes, Poles, and Englishmen to endure the hardships of a transatlantic voyage in the age of sail to explore and settle the unknown territories of the New World.  We've pretty much run out of that sort of thing on this planet, so the moon or Mars is the next frontier, as the old Star Trek series used to tell us.  It's no coincidence that the peak of that show's popularity was the late sixties, although its descendants have a cult following that continues to this day. 

Science fiction is one thing, but taking a substantial fraction of a nation's gross domestic product and spending it on sending a few people out of this world is not to be undertaken lightly, even if it is privately funded instead of paid for by governments.  It's the same kind of thing that the Egyptians did when they built the Pyramids, and it's no accident that most of the great construction achievements of the ancient and medieval world—pyramids, tombs, temples, cathedrals—involved religion in some way.  With those who reply "none" to the pollster's question about religious belief increasing in our U. S. population, it seems pointless to hope that an explicitly religious motive could be found to unite people behind a new effort to go to either the moon or Mars. 

But as the quasi-religious devotion of some Trekkies to the Star Trek franchise shows, some entirely secular things can become a religion for some people.  A lot of the folks who work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) have a kind of religious fervor about their jobs.  And a good many Silicon Valley types believe with an almost religious conviction that once we overheat this planet we'll have no choice but to load up our interplanetary U-Hauls and move to another one. 

The danger in that kind of thinking is that it can begin to inculcate the attitude that any sacrifice in the present is worth doing for the future paradise that awaits.  Though I don't see any sign that this is happening yet, one could imagine a dictatorial government forcing its people into grinding poverty for the sake of a space program that at most could benefit a few dozen individuals directly.  The same sacrifice of present goods for the ever-receding magnificent future was the way that Communism tempted (and still tempts) people to do highly immoral things right now for the sake of imagined future generations.  The way things look now, we're in little danger of doing that in the U. S., but it might happen in China. 

If we do land on the moon by 2024 (only five years from now), I will be happy to watch a full-color, 4K-definition image of someone young enough to be Neil Armstrong's grandson (or granddaughter) set foot on the moon for the second time.  But I'm not placing any bets on it, and not just because I'm not the gambling type, either.

Sources:   Physics Today's article "Quo Vadis, NASA:  The Moon, Mars, or both?" by David Kramer appeared on pp. 22-26 of the July 2019 issue. 

Israel's Iron Dome and the Ethics of War

Just before I wrote this, I learned that a cease-fire negotiated last Friday between Israel and Hamas collapsed after less than two hours.  For the last few weeks, the Gaza-based Hamas organization has been shooting Grad-type rockets at Israel, and Israel has lately been responding both with aerial attacks and ground action in Gaza itself.  By many reports, the damage done by the rockets fired from Gaza into Israel would be much worse if it were not for Israel's air-defense system called Iron Dome.  According to the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), Iron Dome succeeds in intercepting about 80% of rockets that come within its zone of protection, and is one reason why civilian casualties in Israel from the rocket attacks have been so low. 

The ethics of the Israeli-Hamas conflict is, shall we say, outside the scope of this blog.  Rather, I would like to look at the ethics of war as it concerns engineers, with Iron Dome as a case in point.  From the viewpoint of a student about to graduate from engineering school, should you consider job offers from military contractors?  And if not, why not?  Just to make it interesting, let's say you're graduating from the Technion, Israel's premier technology university.  What choices do you face regarding the military and working for military contractors?

As many people know, there is universal conscription in Israel.  Theoretically, all men over the age of 18 serve in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) for three years (two for women).  It's not as universal as it sounds:  according to Wikipedia, about half of those drafted manage to avoid serving for various reasons having to do with religious exemptions, being members of exempted communities, or even by being a conscientious objector.  To avoid service, a conscientious objector (CO) has to have a principled opposition to all war and conflict, not just particular conflicts that the IDF is engaged in.  And this is not an easy path to tread:  one study of applicants for CO status in Israel from around 2000 found that only about ten percent of applicants were granted the exemption.

So, say you've served your three years in the IDF and you now want to have nothing to do with the military ever again.  There's plenty of job opportunities in technical fields in Israel for non-defense work.  You could work for Given Imaging, for example.  They're a medical-device outfit that has pioneered the development of capsule endoscopy:  swallowable video cameras, to be specific.  A cousin of mine took one of these as a part of an investigation of why he was having acid reflux.  I don't think the results wound up on YouTube, but if there had been anything serious wrong, the pictures would have been courtesy Given Imaging, or maybe one of their imitators.

But wait—you look into the background of Given Imaging, and you find that it's actually a spinoff from a company that specializes in commercializing military technology.  Look hard enough, and you find that the same organization that makes Iron Dome also spun off the medical firm Given Imaging.  Originally called the Science Corps at Israel's founding in 1948, the government-funded military R&D organization was renamed Rafael in 1958, and restructured as a profit-making, though still government-owned, company in 2002, now known as Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.  As anyone striving for total purity in association or support will find, if you trace money, influence, or history back far enough, sooner or later you'll find something you don't like.

So let's take the opposite view:  say your sister was one of the few Israeli civilians killed by a Grad rocket fired by Hamas from Gaza, and you'd like to do what you can to prevent it from happening again.  If you had joined Rafael back in 2007, you could have gotten in on the ground floor of the development of Iron Dome.  The idea of a rocket defense system occurred to the IDF long before then, but American advisers looked at the relatively small Rafael organization in the relatively small country of Israel and told the Israelis not to waste their time, that such an idea was "doomed to fail."  Antimissile defense systems developed by the U. S. have a checkered past, to be sure, and the only one that seemed to have had a major effect on global politics—Star Wars in the 1980s—was never actually deployed fully.  When President Reagan just threatened to build it, it scared the socks off the USSR.  And the mere threat of making an enemy's weapons useless is often a good strategic weapon of its own.

But the threats Israel was experiencing in recent years were not theoretical.  Grad rockets were originally developed by the USSR in the 1960s as dumb weapons whose inaccuracy (they are less aimable than even conventional gun-fired shells) is intended to be overcome by sheer numbers.  Nobody knows where a Grad rocket will fall, including those who fire them.  These types of rockets make a good target for a sophisticated radar-guided defense system like Iron Dome, whose optical-tracking missiles can home in on a target and explode it before it reaches the ground.  Of course, the resulting debris don't just go away—even after a successful interception, you will have pieces of hot scrap metal falling to the ground, which can be inconvenient, to say the least.  But what you won't have is 6 to 22 kg (14 to 50 pounds) of high explosive propelling shrapnel all around your back yard, which is what a Grad rocket can do if it lands and explodes.

The choice of an engineering career is always an interesting one, but for Israeli engineering graduates these days, it must be especially so.   There is room in the discipline of engineering for those who believe wholeheartedly in war, for those who oppose war with every fiber of their being, and for those who may not want to work on systems that actually kill people, but who want to defend innocent lives against attacks.  Iron Dome looks like a lifesaver to me, and whatever your beliefs about the Israel-Hamas conflict in general, I think most engineers would agree that the system is a fine piece of work.

Sources:  I referred to Wikipedia articles with the following titles:  Iron Dome, Conscription in Israel, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, and Hamas.  The report on the short-lived ceasefire was carried online by CNN at http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/01/world/meast/mideast-crisis/index.html.