Ad astra

The point of this story has little to do with my own experience: it’s instead to illustrate the power of space in stimulating intellectual curiosity. More than 50,000 students attended Space Camp in Florida during the 13 years it was open, and thousands more visit Cape Canaveral each year. The exploration of the “Final Frontier” is an inextricable part of the American educational psyche.

So far, NASA — Space Camp for adults — has survived the budget wars in Washington relatively unscathed. In the budget deal that President Obama signed last week, its funding was increased, not cut. And lawmakers have mandated that the agency spend at least $3 billion on a rocket project and space capsule designed to maintain American supremacy in space.

But its essential responsibilities have changed. A year ago, President Obama vowed to end the Constellation Program, which seeks to return astronauts to the moon and advance manned spaceflight to Mars and beyond. And with the end of the STS space shuttle program this year, the United States will have no national plan for space exploration for the first time in 50 years.

Conservatives, including columnist Brian Lipshutz on this page earlier this week, have put a target on NASA’s forehead, arguing that space exploration ought be left to private industry and that privatization is a necessary casualty of a new fiscal normal. But American exceptionalism entails a responsibility as well as a privilege. And in light of that, the United States should renew its commitment to the exploration of the solar system and resolve to put a man (or a woman) on Mars by the end of this decade.

To begin, there are reasonable, fiscally responsible ways of sending a manned mission to the Red Planet. Robert Zubrin’s 1996 book “The Case for Mars” outlined a plan that would cost roughly $27 billion to $40 billion (adjusted from 1996 to 2010 dollars) and would use the natural resources found on the Martian surface to support a sustained mission there. Zubrin’s plan is only one of many; former President George W. Bush’s 2004 Vision for Space Exploration and the NASA Design Reference Missions are both plausible competitors. Plans like these require substantial government involvement — at least in the form of subsidies to private industry. Companies such as SpaceX, Boeing and Blue Origin won’t find it profitable to go on their own.

Second, there would be tangible security and scientific benefits to a Mars mission. The collective effort required would produce a new wave of scientific innovation — the kind that President Obama proposed in his 2011 State of the Union Address. Mars could provide key insights into the origin of life on Earth, as well as a chance to establish life beyond Earth. If—years or millennia into the future—there is some kind of planetary crisis here at home, Mars will be the likeliest refuge for humankind.

Finally, a manned mission to Mars could create a sense of national inspiration at a time of American malaise and might provide the enthusiasm and interest in public service needed to shock our generation out of political apathy. Conservatives have spent the past two decades vilifying the federal government as useless and ineffective. A successful mission to Mars would demonstrate the value of public servants in achieving national goals.

The primary counterargument to exploration is a financial one: NASA is a luxury that a bankrupt America can no longer afford. But the real luxury is the delusion that the Earth will remain humanity’s only permanent home. Spending on a Mars mission wouldn’t be tantamount to throwing money into space. Lockheed, Boeing, JPL and the other companies involved in such a mission employ thousands of real people across the United States. In the long run, exploration would likely wind up solving many “problems on the ground,” by fostering an interest in science, medicine, engineering and innovation.

But the best defense of space exploration I’ve run across has nothing at all to do with NASA, and was written three decades before the agency was created. In the closing lines of “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald ’17 wrote (of explorers discovering North America), “for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath ... face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” Fitzgerald could never have imagined Tranquility Base or the Eagle Nebula, but it’s that confrontation, the sense of awe that images like the Hubble Deep Field inspire, that should compel us to push beyond the surly bonds of Earth.

Or put more simply, in the words of Sam Seaborn of “The West Wing,” “Mars is next.”

Charlie Metzger is a Wilson School major from Palm Beach, Fla. He can be reached at cmetzger@princeton.edu.