Jew World Order

But it won’t happen. There is no national leadership, no inspiration, no goal.
Budgets will be cut, timetables will slip. The great thing about the Moon as
a destination is that you can stand on the White House lawn and point to it.
But Nasa will not get funding to send astronauts to asteroids – for the
simple reason that most American taxpayers don’t care about asteroids, even
if they know what they are.

So what should Nasa do? After all, the agency still has considerable funds at
its disposal; more, theoretically, since the pointless Space Shuttles were
finally grounded. Personally, I believe that it should, along with its
international partners such as the European and Russian space agencies,
refocus on one overriding goal – to search for life outside the Earth – and
scrap more or less everything else.

After all, there can be no more pressing or fascinating question in the whole
field of space exploration and astronomy. To discover that Earth’s biosphere
is unique, to find that even the most Earth-like planets out there are no
more than sterile rocks, to discover that wherever we look, we see not even
bacterial slime, would be extraordinary. If the evidence stacked up that we
are indeed alone, our view of ourselves – of our place in the universe and
our custodianship of our planet – would take on a whole new meaning.

And, of course, the alternative would be just as awe-inspiring. Finding
microbial life on Mars with a different genetic make-up to earthly life
(showing that the Martian bugs are not the result of meteoritic
cross-contamination between the two planets) would suggest that life is
everywhere. The biochemist Nick Lane of UCL, one of the surprisingly few
scientists in the world who is studying the origin of life, suggested last
month that microbial life probably is everywhere, but that evolution to more
complex forms such as recognisable animals and plants demands a series of
biochemical flukes that may yet mean that life as we know it is vanishingly
rare. This fascinating idea needs exploring.

Under its strategy, what should Nasa do in practical terms? First, expand
robotic exploration of the solar system. With the money saved by cancelling
the Space Shuttle, America – with input from Europe and perhaps India and
China – could send a series of flagship missions to Mars, Europa (a moon of
Jupiter) and Titan (a moon of Saturn) to look for life. The European Space
Agency is building an ambitious new probe to explore the Jovian system. This
was originally meant to be a joint mission with Nasa, but the Americans
pulled out, a decision that should be reversed.

Second, Nasa should wriggle out of its commitment to the International Space
Station, a $100-billion, orbiting white elephant. Congressional law now
demands that Nasa continues to support this exercise until 2017. In May, a
private spacecraft called Dragon successfully docked with the ISS, showing
the commercial space flight can be a reality. Since SpaceX’s Dragon capsule
can carry people, Nasa should effectively privatise the whole ISS enterprise
– and the whole business of getting men and material into orbit. Turn the
station into a hotel, get it sponsored by McDonald’s; anything, really.
Private enterprise may even manage to make it interesting.

With yet more funds saved, Nasa should build a new fleet of space telescopes.
In terms of value for money, few machines can compete with the Kepler
Observatory. At a cost of $600 million (about the price of a single Space
Shuttle launch) this space telescope has revolutionised our view of the
cosmos. Designed to search for “exoplanets” orbiting nearby stars, it has
found more than 2,000 in just three years, including dozens that are roughly
Earth-like in size and temperature.

Twenty years ago, we did not know of a single exoplanet; now, it is estimated
that there are at least 30,000 potentially habitable planets within 1,000
light years of Earth – places such as Kepler 22b, a world bigger than our
own yet with similar surface temperatures and possibly a huge ocean covering
its surface.

We need more Keplers, and bigger ones. Large space telescopes, or fleets of
space telescopes, placed either in Earth’s orbit or at the solar system’s
gravitational oases (known as the Lagrange points) would allow us to survey
nearby Earth-like planets, sniffing their atmospheres spectroscopically for
oxygen, methane, water vapour and the like – the tell-tale signs of a
biosphere. With a really big telescope, we could theoretically see the
dark-light colour changes that may signify continents and oceans passing as
the planet rotates.

This does not mean, however, that human space exploration should cease
altogether. A return to the Moon makes sense, not least because the lunar
far side is an ideal place to build extremely large telescopes that could
explore the surfaces of “Earth twins” even more effectively. And if Mars
looks promising, it remains the case that a human astrobiologist could
achieve in a week what the best robot could only do in three years.

Yet concentrating on a search for life would have the advantages of being
scientifically valid, being relatively cheap and connecting with the public
imagination. Since 1972, Americans have spent far more money making and
watching movies about fictional aliens than they ever spent actually going
into real space. Looking for ET will garner rather more enthusiasm than
growing cress seeds in orbit. And there is a case for devoting modest public
funds in the search for alien radio signals.

There remain scientifically and culturally valid reasons to maintain a human
presence in space, not to mention more nebulous justifications such as
vicarious excitement and national pride. But Nasa should leave the
flag-planting, for now, to the privateers and to other nations (the next
humans on the Moon will be Chinese, arriving in the late 2020s). Go looking
for life, and it may well find it. Once it does, all bets will be off – and
Nasa might just get the money to do whatever it wants.