President Trump should devote more NASA resourcing to high-risk, high-gain research into interstellar travel.
Don’t get me wrong, I welcome the Trump administration’s strategy to see humans back on the face of the Moon and step for the first time onto Mars. As my colleague Phil Wegmann notes, this endeavor exemplifies American dreaming even in the era of our fraught politics. Traveling to Mars presents unique scientific opportunities to benefit future generations and while there is risk involved in doing so, those who would make the trip are America’s best.
That said, the limit of these exploration missions is that they are focused on a known unknown: the solar system. More specifically, these efforts are not focused on the rest of the Milky Way galaxy or on the hundreds of billions of other galaxies beyond our galaxy. And if we are ever to explore beyond the solar system, we are going to have to figure out how to get across large distances in far shorter periods of time. We will have to travel at near-light speeds just to visit nearby stars.
But there’s a problem: funding for these programs currently takes a back seat to more physically-deliverable activities such as building new satellite and unmanned research vessels. So what should be done?
Considering our national deficit and debt, new spending seems unjustifiable. Instead, Trump could reallocate a little money from NASA’s existing budgets into the interstellar mission portfolio. The money is there to be found: NASA spends more than $1.4 billion on the international space station and $1.7 billion on Earth-based research (NASA should be about space!). Moving some funds around would provide new research grants and programs to pool efforts. Regardless, as NASA’s 2019 fiscal year request shows, there are many other areas where money can be found.
There’s one final point of note. With new U.S. government materials being published that show unidentified aerial phenomena operating in unique ways, the U.S. has a national security interest in identifying the viability of new forms of air and space mobility. These research efforts would support that agenda by widening our knowledge of science even if faster-than-light travel was later found to be impossible.
Still, the overriding motivation for all space-based research and exploration is the expansion of human knowledge and the benefits that flow with it. So while we’re right to think locally toward the Moon and Mars, we should also put some money into more expansive priorities.
