Michael Williams, a 28-year-old congressional candidate in Alabama, has suggested that we tax science-fiction to help fund NASA. According to the article, the consensus is that Williams is a loon. Well, let’s give him some credit: if Williams is a loon, he is a loon who has parlayed his looniness into at least several hundred thousand dollars worth of free publicity.
The tax proposal, of course, is impractical to say the least. The most obvious problem is that it is nearly impossible to define what science-fiction is. Defining genres is an interesting parlor game, to be sure — but it would get a lot less fun once real money was on the line. However, I kinda sorta see Williams’s point. The problem with NASA is that it spends its money on science-fiction driven goals such as putting humans in space — rather than doing science.
Take the International Space Station (please!). The construction budget has eaten into the budget for scientifc experiments to the point where they can only support the maintenance of the station… because they have no money to support the four civilian crew members who would be running the actual experiments. Unless the ISS gets another huge budget increase, the entire $125 billion dollar project will merely serve to establish a human presence in space.
Then there’s the Space Shuttle. My college once invited Freeman Dyson to speak, with an informal chat afterwards. I was shocked to discover that Dyson hated the Space Shuttle. Whaaat? My formative years had been spent reading Odyssey Magazine, and they had never once mentioned that there was anything bad about the Shuttle. On the other hand, when someone whose brain works on an entirely different plane from yours tells you that one of your cherished beliefs is just flat-out wrong, it behooves you to Investigate Further.
And so I did. And I discovered that contrary to its original design specifications, the Shuttle is not fully reusable, it cannot achieve high Earth orbits, and it is anything but cheap. Worst of all, it has wasted billions of dollars that could have been spent doing research far more efficiently.
Honestly, I’m all for humans in space. But what is our goal here? If it’s to do science, let’s do science. If it’s to colonize space — great. But we need to develop the next couple of generations of materials and propulsion systems so that it becomes cost-effective. Unfortunately, because our technology is so primitive right now, the sad fact is that if you do one, you hobble the other.
When China announces that they have managed to hatch a few chicken eggs in orbit — that’s nice, and I’m sure they’ll gather some interesting data on the effects of space travel on biological organisms. But so what? First, who says that chickens in a tin can in low earth orbit is an accurate simulation of the ships of the future? (Will our ships have better radiation shielding? Will they rotate to simulate gravity? Who knows?) Second, even if the data is valid, we won’t need it until long-term space travel becomes affordable — several decades at least.
Look, we sent some men up in tin cans in the 1960s, and miraculously very few of them died. And we beat the Russkies. Yay us! But space is no longer a pissing contest, and I would rather see the money spent on robot probes. Or heck, vaccination programs. In the meantime, I’m perfectly happy to read books and watch movies… hopefully tax-free.
