A couple of weeks ago I saw a tv news report on a launch of a space probe of some sort – I forget which one it was. At the end of the news item, the anchor closed with the cheerful statement that it was one more step in gaining the expertise “we are going to need for space travel”. And I thought “wow, you’re still drinking the kool-aid”. When you look past the excitement, the mystique, of being an astronaut, you will find that space travel is an impractical dream, a juvenile fantasy, and neither a need nor a practical aspiration for mankind.

The Canadian Space Agency web page tells us that “We advance the knowledge of space through science and ensure that space science and technology provide social and economic benefits for Canadians.” I’m OK with that, especially the part about ensuring that we provide social and economic benefits. It’s quite true that Canadian companies have done well out of space research – Canadarms 1, 2, & 3, for example, have provided useful employment and generated intellectual property for Canadians.

Government funding for the Space Agency was announced in March of 2023 as approximately $2.5B spread over about 13 years, or about $200M per year. That’s not chump change. It seems like a lot of money to be wasting. I think it’s way too much and I’d cut it way back. However, it amounts to only about $5 per citizen per year, and I think the country is OK with that level of expenditure. Silly though the objective may be, our hearts swell with pride when we learn that a Canadian will be one of the astronauts heading for the moon in the next lunar mission. And who knows? Research of any kind is useful and something good might come out of it.

However, in the meantime, the National Research Council budget is scheduled to decline from $1.65B in 2021 to $1.28B in 2025, which means that we’ll only spend about $6 on researching the world we live in for every dollar we spend on the space travel dream. And that ratio, in my opinion, is absurd.

I remember July of 1969 when Apollo 11 delivered Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin onto the moon. It made for terrific television – historic, suspenseful, successful. I also remember the near-tragedy of the Apollo 13 accident which nearly did for Tom Hanks. After Armstrong and Aldrin, there were five more moon landings culminating with Apollo 17 in December of 1972 but quite honestly, I couldn’t tell you a hell of a lot about any of them. Moon landings quickly lost their cachet – they’d become ho-hum already.

An article on the History Channel web-page reports in July 2023 that “The Apollo program was a costly and labor-intensive endeavor, involving an estimated 400,000 engineers, technicians and scientists, and costing $24 billion (close to $100 billion in today’s dollars).”

A hundred billion dollars! Wow! Now ask yourself why the US took on that expense to send someone to the moon. A discussion paper from the JFK library provides the answer – “Space was the latest theater for battling the Cold War and provided an opportunity for the United States to promote leadership and demonstrate the technological advances of a free and democratic society. In order to do that, the United States needed to reach the Moon before the Soviet Union.” It was all about democracy over communism. It was cold war posturing. For context, Kennedy’s challenge to send a man to the moon was delivered a month after the embarrassing Bay of Pigs debacle and about a year before the Cuban missile crisis. International tensions were high, and the major powers were competing for the hearts and minds of the third world. At 17 years of age, I didn’t understand any of that, and I never questioned the rationale for the space race. It was generally thrilling stuff and I was hooked.

Some good things came out of the race to the moon. Tang orange drink crystals and WD-40 and a really neat ball-point pen that would still write in zero gravity conditions were all products of the space race. Of course, the biggest product was the development of controlled rocketry which led to the deployment of roughly 8000 satellites in orbit around earth, providing us with GPS, satellite tv, and surveillance cameras that allow rich nations to spy on each other. Research, for whatever original purpose, is very often important and productive in ways that weren’t dreamed of by the researcher.

It’s fifty-five years later now, and I’m not that dewy-eyed schoolboy any more. In fact, I’m now a cranky old fart.

I have some sad news for you space travel groupies. There is no big future for mankind in space travel. Buzz Lightyear doesn’t live here, man. I understand that space travel and exploration sound like a grand adventure. But first, we ought to seriously examine the “why or why not” of space travel. What do we think we’re going to accomplish? What problem are we trying to solve?

Well, cold war politics aside, there are only four reasons for us to aspire to space travel. The first is intelligence gathering – we want to know more about what’s out there. And to keep this brief, I’ll just dismiss that one out of hand. Unmanned space probes are already discovering lots of stuff and will do a better job of exploration at a tiny fraction of the cost. The second reason is that there is a very desirable destination out there – someplace where we really want to visit. The third possibility is treasure – there’s something out there that we really value and we’re going to try to get it and bring it back to Earth. And the fourth and last possibility is that it’s all about the journey.

So then, destinations. What are we looking for? Are we trying to find a future home for excess population? Some place to ship the Mexicans and Colombians since Trump won’t help them over the border wall? Where is that home?

The moon has no air, no water, and soil which, according to the Natural History Museum web-site, is “very poor in water, carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, so naturally lunar soils don’t have the nutrients to support plant growth.

Mercury? No atmosphere and temperatures ranging from -180 C to +430 C. Worse than Bruce County. Not a practical target for colonization.

Venus? Venus has surface temperatures “hot enough to melt lead”.

Mars? Well, at least Mars does have an atmosphere, but “The atmosphere of Mars is much thinner than Earth’s. The Red Planet’s atmosphere contains more than 95% carbon dioxide and much less than 1% oxygen.”

Once you get out past Mars you get the gas giants – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Let’s accept that in the absence of something that feels like a solid, we’re not going to live on or in a gas giant. So, Mars is the best bet, which is why it gets so much attention. But being the very best of a bunch of terrible choices isn’t much of a recommendation, is it?

What about the next solar system? The unmanned Voyager probes, travelling at 35000 km/hr will take 40000 years to reach the outer edge of the next closest solar system. If we could increase the speed of travel by a factor of 100, it would still take 400 years. And then you have to add a few hundred more years to get to the inner portion of that system, where habitable planets might be. Les Johnson, author of “A Traveler’s Guide to the Stars,” and a propulsion technologist at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center says of interstellar travel that “The distances are vast, and the energies required are almost unimaginably large…. they consider it to be science fiction.”

All of which says that there is no destination out there that’s worth visiting much less trying to colonize. Science fiction tells us that we will “terraform” alien planets to make them more earth-like. Well, the best possibility for that inside our solar system is Mars, and according to the Planetary Society, “Terraforming Mars is therefore a daunting endeavor that doesn’t seem possible with current technology.”

OK, so what about treasure? Are we going to go out like the Spanish treasure ships and bring back tons of gold from the new world? Let’s think about the economics of that. It took about $100B in today’s terms to get a few men on the moon. What is the commodity sitting on the moon or any of the inner planets that will have more value when brought back to Earth than the cost of getting it here? How do we generate the lifting capability to get any significant amount of material off the surface of Mars and bring it home with us? And once we aim a big chunk of rock at Earth, how do we slow it down and protect it so that it doesn’t burn up in Earth’s atmosphere? Or so it doesn’t flatten a small city when it lands?

Northrup Grumann, an aerospace and defence technology company tells us that the treasure might be out there. They say “There are 17 rare metals that are scant to find on earth but may be found on the moon.” However, on the practical matter of how do you mine it and bring it back to Earth, they say “How companies might undertake such a venture and return high-value materials to Earth remains to be seen”. Treasure hunting does not, to me at least, seem like a rational excuse for space travel.

And that brings us to the fourth reason for a journey, and that is that we might really enjoy the experience. But no, we probably wouldn’t really enjoy the experience. An article in the National Library of Medicine lists about four dozen health hazards associated with space travel. Many, but not all, of them are related to the effects of microgravity and to the effects of space radiation. For about a quarter of them, the table records that no specific countermeasures exist. Our understanding of space travel medical hazards has been gained from 50 years of space travel by 676 superbly fit people who were medically screened and qualified for the journey. A less select group might exhibit more symptoms than the long list that these select astronauts have suffered. But just a few of the recognized hazards of space travel are:

• Reduced cardiac performance including “cardiac atrophy” for longer term microgravity exposure.
• Muscle and bone atrophy. (when bone is unloaded owing to lack of gravity, bones start to lose density with potential for osteoporosis)
• Spaceflight Associated Neuro-Occular Syndrome (SANS – suspected causes is that lack of gravity causes excess fluid build-up in the eyes, changing their shape and impairing vision)
• Motion sickness
• Changes to smell and taste
• A whole bunch of potential impacts from space radiation exposure including several different cancer risks, radiation induced cataracts, potential genetic effects, and radiation induced heart damage.

Let’s think specifically about radiation risks. The National Library of Medicine article had this little tidbit for us to consider. “NASA, for example, has updated crew permissible career exposure limits to 0.6Sv, independent of age and sex. This degree of exposure results in a 2–3% mean increased risk of death from radiation carcinogenesis (NCRP 2021). This limit would be reached between 200 and 400 days of space travel (depending on degree of radiation shielding).”

Those of us who worked at Bruce Power are more familiar with measuring our dose in Rem or mRem. A mSv is 100 mrem, so a 0.6Sv career dose limit is 60 rem. In theory, a worker in a nuclear power station in Canada who reached the 2 rem annual administrative dose limit every year for 30 years would have a 60 rem career dose accumulation. But we never really do that. And the astronaut would achieve that dose in just 200 to 400 days of space travel.

According to Space.com, a round trip ticket to Mars will take you away from home for about 21 months, including a three month wait on Mars while you wait for the planets to align for a trip back home. What that means is that a visit to Mars is a one-and-done experience. You would have far exceeded your career dose limit in one trip. In fact, no manager with a conscience could send people out on such a trip because he would know that his people would far exceed their permissible career dose limits.

So space travel? There’s no place to stay, nothing much to do when we’re there, and the journey is bad for you.

In the course of reading for this review, I was struck by how often an article would conclude “more research is required.” Well, I have all the time in the world for research. If Elon Musk (Spacex) and Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) and Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic) want to pour money into space adventures, well good for them. I wish them success. And if wealthy space tourists want to spend $55M for a 3 day orbit, I’m OK with that too. But I’m not so keen on spending public money on the popular, science fiction driven, pipe dream that space travel really is. I’d much rather spend our research dollars on how we continue to thrive on Earth.

We are not, as a species, a set of lucky travellers who happened upon a planet that fortunately met our needs. No, we are what we are because natural selection shaped us to live in this environment. The notion that we will prosper in a totally alien environment is ridiculous. I think that Canada needs to recommit to scientific research, and that the focus of such research should never be outer space. We need to face up to the fact that space travel is a silly escapist dream. Maybe if we accept that there’s no better planet out there for us, we can get serious about doing a better job with the one that have.

Signed, Debbie Downer.