I became a big fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson when he came to Memphis to give a talk last April, where his comedic side had a chance to run wild. I’ve been noticing him showing up all over the TV spectrum for years, mainly on NOVA scienceNOW and The Universe on the History Channel. I bet he gets tired of the comparison, but Tyson has taken on Carl Sagan’s role as cheerleader for science.
Friday night at the Memphis Astronomy club we watched an online video of his Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Colloquium Spring 2008 speech called “Delusions of Space Enthusiasts.” If you have any interest whatsoever about space exploration this is one hour and twenty-five minutes excellently spent.
One reason why I love this speech by Tyson is he covers many topics I’ve explored too and come to the same conclusion. In one segment he attempts to calculate the number of space enthusiasts in the U.S., something that I’ve also attempted. I think I got 300,000 and he got 400,000, but he counted employees working at various aerospace plants that I didn’t count because they should have also been members of the various space enthusiast groups like The Planetary Society, The National Space Society and The Mars Society. Anyway, we both got a small number. Tyson goes a step further and lists many organizations with more than 400,000 members, like the NRA with 4.3 million and the Hanna Montana fan club, with a membership I’ve forgotten, but which dwarfs the total size of all the space groups combined.
First off, Tyson explains that the early days of the space race was political, and that the cold war sent us to the moon and not science or the quest for exploration. He shows how President Kennedy didn’t care for space exploration at all, but wanted us to beat the Russians. Tyson jokes, if you want America to go to Mars, convince the Chinese to say they are going first, even if they have no real intentions.
Tyson spends a great deal of the talk explaining the battle for funding between advocates of robotic and manned missions at NASA. He makes a great case that without manned missions there would be no scientific missions by showing graphs that reveal that the percentage of spending for science missions has always been a fraction of the total NASA budget that directly related to the manned mission budget. He says you can’t sell science to Congress. He says NASA needs more exciting manned missions of exploration to keep NASA moving forward.
However, Tyson doesn’t believe that grand missions to Mars with $400 billion dollar price tags will ever fly. His graphs reveal that NASA has always had about the same amount of effective budget dollars, even compared to the Apollo years, so any new missions beyond LEO will need to fit into those annual budgets. Evidently Tyson was on the brainstorming team that imagined the new Constellation Program and the Orion Crew Vehicle. This back to the future vision is very Apollo like.
One thing Tyson doesn’t cover is whether or not science missions will get the same level of funding once the Constellation Program ramps up. I would think you’d get a lot more astrophysics bang for the buck with robots, but it appears to be Tyson’s belief that manned missions excite the public to carry science along on its coattails.
I highly recommend you download this talk, and also suggest you get the latest version of RealPlayer. Friday night I saw the talk on an older version of the player and it had a lot of bad spots. My version plays the film very smoothly. It’s a shame they didn’t use built in Flash movie technology because video players like Real and Quicktime aren’t universally installed like Flash and discourage people from viewing the video.
For more Neil deGrasse Tyson science lectures with sparkling humor, just search on his name at YouTube.
Jim
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