China, India, and romance

06/24/03 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

Gwynne Dyer's commentary in the Salt Lake Tribune (quoted by slashdot this past weekend) makes an interesting case; the main discussion is on the stated plans by India and China to develop manned space flight, and what sounds like the start of a race between them to the Moon. But one quote I thought in particular stood out: bq. What may be emerging here, indeed, is the next major era of manned space exploration – something that will annoy those who believe that space is a primarily scientific enterprise, and delight those who think it is about something larger. These unashamed romantics use historical analogies about the discovery of new lands and wax eloquent about humanity's destiny when asked exactly what that larger thing is, because the very nature of exploration is that you don't know what is there before you find it. But they don't want to be ruled by the accountants and they don't want to leave it all to the robots – and in the industrialized world, they have been losing most of the arguments for a long time now. When they were winning them, back in the '60s and early '70s it was thanks to the acute rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, which was just as much about prestige as it was about military power. Men in orbit and on the moon translated into prestige then, and it would do so all the more for Asia's great rivals, China and India, because they would essentially be supplanting the first-generation space powers of the industrialized world.

What's exciting to me about this article is that Dyer (who happens to come from Newfoundland, where I grew up) usually writes about war and high-level international politics - and yet he seems to have caught in a few words the essence of what captivates so many otherwise “normal” people who have become space enthusiasts. Maybe he hasn't got it all exactly right (I don't personally have a problem with accountants, as long as they're working for me) but he's got the right idea. Let's hope we've just hit a low point, and the romance and adventure of space travel will join with the commercial capabilities of the West to go far beyond what we've done before. And maybe a little competition from Asia won't hurt.