Cooperation: The Only Choice of Mankind as Space Explorer
Yuki David Takahashi
26 May 1995
Cooperation: The Only Choice of Mankind as Space Explorer
Cooperation: The Only Choice of Mankind as Space Explorer
The space race is “history”, and the beginning of the new space exploration is the “present”. Mankind of Earth has been exploring space for possible benefits it can acquire. To human beings, space is a new region of virtually limitless possibilities yet to be disclosed. How the “future” will be in space will ultimately depend on the decision that people of today make for the exploration. This decision is whether the nations of the world work together or choose the old way of racing. To fulfill the purpose of space exploration and to make it more beneficial, the world must cooperate instead of competing.
“Purpose” is the most important matter whenever anyone does something because the person does it to fulfill the purpose, of course. Then what is the purpose of space exploration? It must mirror the purpose of life since people explore space as a way to fulfill their purposes of living. The purpose of life is probably different for everyone. However, one broad similarity is that everyone wants to have an exciting time rather than living days that are identical to the ones before, and that everyone wants to make others have exciting times as well. Similarly, people explore space to make everyone’s life more exciting, and it is by utilizing the uniqueness of space and through potential benefits from exploration.
Being directly interested in space science is the most obvious way to utilize the uniqueness of that region, but that interest is difficult to keep up if people compete in exploration. Admittedly, American people were very interested in the space program during the space race when the United States and the Soviet Union competed for the Moon landing. On televisions and radios many watched and listened to every launching of a spacecraft to make sure it was successful. Soon, however, people in both countries were so concerned about the race that they were more enthusiastic about the competition than actual space science. If racing is their interest, they do not need to choose expensive space expedition as their arena. Exploring “space” is worth it only when it involves something unique to “space”. Race field is certainly not a feature of space. Moreover, some analysts say that because the American people viewed the space program as just a race with the Soviets, they lost their interest in space once the Apollo 11 ended the race by landing on Moon (Blonston G1). The competition did not achieve the purpose of space exploration because it eventually destroyed people’s excitement toward space science.
After the Moon race, the United States continued to compete with other countries in space development to maintain its leadership, again not paying attention to the uniqueness of space. A leader would be helpful for planning and organizing all of the world’s space activities. A leader would not be as helpful, however, if it were only a role-model that did not support others technically. The goal of America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is seemingly restricted to the benefit of only one country, as the goal is to strengthen American technology capability for the United States to remain at the forefront of technology (U.S. Space Academy Level I 1.67). The United States must reexamine what a leader really is, considering the purpose of space exploration. NASA must not view a leader as the winner of competition but as the one who can truly “lead” the world’s space programs. Why do nations have to compete for the leadership? An intention to compete has no intention of helping others, and so a leader makes no sense if it does not help the space development of all nations. In addition, one whole nation being the global leader makes no sense at all, especially because one specialty of space is that it is completely outside the earth where no national boundary exists. Considering this feature, regarding space exploration as a global-wide activity is totally natural. Therefore, heads of each nation meeting to form the global leadership is also natural. Nations of the earth do not need to and must not compete for the leadership of outer space ventures because a leader is for benefit of all and there is no national distinction in space. Competition has ignored another significant specialty of space.
In spite of these views that competition does not follow the purpose of space exploration, racing at first seems to make rapid progress. President Kennedy’s decision to send human beings to Moon initially sounded incredible. He announced his decision as a reply to the Soviet’s victory in sending the first man into space only two months earlier--before even the United States had sent its first astronaut. Apollo 11 did land on Moon in July 1969. Appropriation of NASA funding increased drastically during the first several years after the decision to challenge the Soviets to Moon. Its appropriation of $964 million in 1961 jumped up to as much as $5.1 billion by 1964 (Newton 89). This is a dreamlike increase for today’s NASA which is suffering from severe budget-cuts. Nevertheless, the fund was for competition.
Competition is destructive: competitors never help each other but wish for each other’s failure and sometimes even damage each other.
Then why do people compete? “For no physically or socially beneficial reason” is the answer and experiences show why. During the Moon race, both the United States and the Soviet Union had to take extra care to keep as much information secretive as possible. In Men from Earth by Buzz Aldrin who is the second astronaut to land on Moon, he said Americans had to guess the Soviet’s technology and plans from their public statements as well as radio intercepts of their spacecraft communications (97). If they had not been racing, they could have asked the others directly for these information instead of disgracefully tapping wires with much waste of time and money. Aldrin also described how the goal of the Soviet space program was simply to beat Americans with the “firsts” even if they had to lower their safety. For the first woman in space, the Soviets hastily selected several women and put them into intensive training. Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, was only a factory worker who was good at skydiving. Also when the Soviet prime minister, Nikita Khrushchev, heard that America had plans to send two men together into space soon and three men later, he instantly decided to send three cosmonauts into space at once. To hurry, the engineers had to modify a previous spacecraft designed only for one crew member; and consequently the three cosmonauts could not even wear space suits in the small capsule (Aldrin 109-110). Although the three cosmonauts were able to come back alive, the time wasted on the mission greatly interrupted the development of the more important Soyuz spacecraft. Aldrin said the Soviets “had won another meaningless propaganda victory” (111). The pressure from competition can make people risk even human lives and still gain essentially no profit.
Today, many people criticize the wasteful competition in the Moon race. Thomas Hughes, a specialist in sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, said, “The Moon shot didn’t have much bearing on other pursuits because it was basically irrelevant. It was an achievement that was not dedicated to a social need” (Blonston G1). Since the Moon race has brought about numerous inefficiencies and dangers, space explorers must never repeat such competition if they are to make everyone’s life more exciting through benefits of exploration.
Although America’s involvement in the Moon race was an inefficient effort, the most helpful initiator and supporter of the challenge was the American people’s pride in their nation; but this still did not mean the national pride was favorable. The competition began when President Kennedy said, “It is time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement. For while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last” (Soviet-American Rivalry 1). This president’s decision to go to Moon reflected the American citizen’s desire to be proud of their country in the early 1960s. They wanted to believe that their country was better than the Soviet Union which had just beaten the United States by sending the first man into space. Being proud of one’s own nation is not destructive directly. However, nationalistic people in a competition tend to become concerned strictly about their own country and gain only negative impressions about people living in the opponent’s country. They almost always forget to really care about the foreign people. Kennedy’s words are clearly concerning the well-being of no other nation but the United States. Nationalistic people become too narrow-minded to ask themselves indispensable questions like “Why am I wishing for the other country to fail? Isn’t this extremely childish that we just want to win and not care about others? Is space exploration something only for people born in this country to enjoy?” Space exploration is for everyone in the world to have more exciting time with. If one group of people is having exciting times but not the other, they are not serving the purpose of space exploration at all. Competition does not allow competitors to fulfill the purpose because both parties can never win together: there is always a loser.
Moreover, like nationalistic people tend to gain negative impressions against their opponents, competition is warlike. The continual space race between the United States and Russia has been called the Cold War. Today, older people still feel the hostility toward their former enemies and are competitive. Al Neuharth, 71 year-old USA Today founder, says, “Whoever holds the upper hand in space ultimately will hold the trump card on Earth” (A11). John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, responds, “Neuharth’s nostalgia for the era of Apollo in the Cold War is almost touching. The time when space achievement is a symbol of national virility is far behind us” (Neuharth A11). Why do people need to fight or race to explore space if their purpose is all the same? Human beings never needed to go through this era of fighting between nations, but this now is history and they have learned that it is both destructive and purposeless. As people today explore outer space and begin feeling that the exploration is a more global-wide activity, they will find that they must not have warlike competition but take an opposite way--peaceful cooperation.
Although fighting between nations must be history, the United States is still worried about national security upon cooperating with other nations. Richard Thomas, director of the Center for Strategic Technology at Texas A & M University, thought a collaborative effort with Russia would be unwise because their space program was 80% military (Warren 9). He believed that Russians had a clear plan to develop war capability in space. People like Thomas are afraid that by sharing America’s technological expertise with Russia, the Russians would apply that technology to military. Still, these people at least know that cooperation is better than competition. Michael Michaud, director of the Office of Advanced Technology at the U.S. State Department, has an idea for a “safe” joint mission to Mars. One of the two countries--the United States or Russia--would provide the sample collector and the other would provide the sample return vehicle, and these machines would only meet on Mars so that technology of the United States would not transfer to Russia (Beaudan 37). This may sound reasonable, but only if national security was not a concern, these nations can cooperate far more efficiently in the space missions.
Instead of considering international war an inevitable destiny, all people of the earth must work to make war a nonreturnable history. Peaceful cooperation in space exploration is an ideal approach. Since space is a special field that does not distinguish one nation from another, possible problems will unlikely be international. Rather, nations exploring space for a common purpose will be likely to face common problems which they can solve together. As nations cooperate in higher and higher intensity with shares of ideas, people of the nations will understand each other more and more deeply. They will be able to throw out negative stereotypes that have been passed on from the World Wars and the space race. Trust will develop between nations and they will become more open to each other. In fact, when the Soviet’s Soyuz and America’s Apollo spacecraft performed the first collaborative docking in 1975, the very secretive Soviet Union broadcasted its Soyuz craft landing live throughout the world for the very first time in its nearly 20 years of history in space (Beaudan 37). As the United States, Russia, and other countries cooperate, their relationship should become much like that among states within a country and they will never even think about starting a violent war. Unlike competition that can only benefit one party at the best, cooperation is universal--it creates peaceful relations among nations, which is a benefit for all parties.
Though war may be of no great concern today after learning lessons from the two dreadful World Wars, some people are still afraid that even minor political conflict could easily ruin international space programs. In 1994, John Pike, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Space Policy Project, listed Russia’s instability as a concern for including that nation in an international space station program--which started off with only the United States, Canada, Japan, and Western European countries. Russia remains to have internal confrontation between Westernizers and Slavophiles, which can easily change the political structure of the country, leading to Russia’s withdrawal from the space station program. In fact, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 blocked any further U.S.-Soviet joint missions that had begun with the Apollo-Soyuz docking in 1975 (Pike 17). Because of the dynamics of Russia’s political change, NASA is hesitant about cooperating with them on long-term missions. Roald Sagdeyev, director of Russia’s Space Research Institute, strongly felt that the United States and Russia should work on a common program of investigating Mars and its satellites, and Russians asked the United States to participate (Beaudan 37). NASA, however, feared that a problem in the superpower relation might threaten the success of that mission. Still, the United States must not ignore the other country’s political instability that stands against space exploration.
Fear of possible mission failure due to instability of other nations must not be a reason for not cooperating with them, because if the stable nations ignore the space activities of the unstable nations, they are already failing to achieve the purpose of space exploration--universality. Stable nations must help unstable countries create an environment that does not allow political conflicts to restrict the universally beneficial and universally exciting space exploration. An effective way of helping is to actually cooperate in space exploration with the unstable nations. Working together will build up responsibility in their space program. If they continue to cooperate without giving up, the responsibility as well as friendship will be strong enough for their space activities to be almost separate from political issues. For example, the European Space Agency, now involving as many as thirteen Western European countries, has been actively exploring space since its foundation back in 1975 despite the occasional political conflicts between its members (Rycroft 145). Political problems will no longer be a concern when the responsibility of the program and friendship among the partners are preeminent. Cooperation can achieve this responsible and friendly relationship that will effectively share the excitement of space exploration.
Actual participants of collaborative projects can best confirm the superiority of cooperation. In 1985, ten years after the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, three American astronauts and two Russian cosmonauts who participated in the docking came together to call for further cooperation and for joint missions to Mars (Booth 96). This docking was the only large-scale collaboration between the United States and Russia until recently despite its peaceful result. No single person who was involved in the project probably felt it was a worthless enterprise. In February this year, the American space shuttle and Russia’s space station performed a rendezvous and all the astronauts repeated happy comments. "It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in space," said James Wetherbee, commander of the shuttle, who had been in space before this mission. Alexander Viktorenko, commander of the space station, said it was "almost like a fairly tale... almost too good to be true" (Drago A8). These astronauts' impressions show that working together is an exciting venture.
Despite the universal peacefulness and excitement of cooperation, many people still believe the United States’ technological efficiency would decrease by cooperating. In 1990, still more than 20% of Americans surveyed in a Market Opinion Research poll did not agree with participation of both the United States and other nations in space missions to Mars (Ladwig and Ramlose 25). Many American space experts believe that the United States is fully capable of going to Mars alone. The biggest concern that John Pike listed about cooperating with Russia was the reliability of its space program. Russia may be an unpredictable and unreliable partner because of its recent problems such as cancellation and delay of its Mars 94 missions and failure of resupply craft to Mir space station. Pike also said there is a clear difference in the ways of engineering and program management between the United States and Russia, and that these nations may not readily accept each other's approaches even if they seem good (17). But can real cooperation ever be less efficient than isolated efforts?
Cooperation is constructive: cooperators always help each other, care enough about each other to fairly share their benefits, and are never destructive to each other.
Then why don't people cooperate? “For no physically or socially beneficial reason” is the answer and experiences show why. The European Space Agency's (ESA) Ariane launch vehicle is a good example for a possible result of not cooperating. An ESA spokesman, Elaerts, said, "We wouldn't have developed Ariane if NASA had let us use their system and the same holds true for manned space operations. We must keep our options open by having our own program even though cooperation with other nations would be the best ideal" (Pumpianski 1). If NASA had been more cooperative, ESA could have used the same money, which was put into the whole new launch system, in some other way that would probably be helpful for NASA as well. Ariane, anyhow, has been a great success because collaboration among the European nations has enabled outstanding efficiency. Establishment of cooperation, for example, allowed ESA to manufacture the rocket’s solid fuel on launch site, reducing the Ariane’s cost to $100 million per launch compared to the U.S. space shuttle’s $500 million (Luxner 13). By 1990, only 3 years after the Ariane’s approval, the launcher had already returned more than 3 times the investment made to develop it (Rycroft 329). By 1991, Arianespace, the ESA’s manufacturer of Ariane, had captured as much as 50% of the global commercial launch market (Worshop 174). ESA is now the third largest space agency next to those of the United States and Russia, but it is probably the most hopeful because of its openness to cooperate for maximum efficiency.
Tons of other collaborative efforts, of course, have been successful. When the Comet Halley approached Earth in 1986, the Soviet Union, Japan, Europe, and the United States at first sent spacecraft individually to investigate the comet. Because these nations realized that the profit would be the greatest by operating the missions together, they set up an international agency called the Inter-Agency Consultative Group to observe the comet cooperatively (Beaudan 37). Instead of working separately for exactly the same results, cooperation would complete the same job much more efficiently and would make available even further observations.
Cooperation can never be inefficient if all partners are truly working together with understanding of the purpose of space exploration. Even if the United States alone is fully capable of going to Mars, it has no reason to make that venture an isolated effort. The United States must be open enough to work with other nations not only for even higher efficiency but also for a share of excitement and benefits with everyone on the earth. Also, constructive cooperators should not view the technological and management differences between the United States and Russia a problem, but rather an opportunity. It is a chance for a maximum efficiency when the strengths of each party combine. To effectively unify the abilities all around the world, the next step for space explorers of Earth is clear.
A goal for humankind of Earth today on space exploration is to create a world space agency. Because space is a unique region outside Earth and because cooperation is totally efficient, space exploration being an activity by this whole world is natural and sensible. If the United Nations has been possible, so should the world space agency. People who think that such a large-scale agency just for space is ridiculous must realize that this is just the beginning of the space age and a worldwide space organization is nothing unusual for people in this era. Indeed, such organization should have been created from the time human being started venturing away from Earth, but confrontation between nations in the Cold War unfortunately chose the destructive path of competing. Now it is the task of the present generation to maintain an environment peaceful enough for an effective world agency. Kenneth Pedersen, former director of the International Affairs for NASA, has proposed “the organization, on a regular basis, of multilateral meetings of space agency heads” (Logsdon 65). This may be a careful starting for the eventual world agency. This agency plan is an issue today. Everyone--not just people working with space agencies--must support the idea because the cooperative space agency will be ideal for fulfillment of the purpose of space exploration that emphasizes a share of excitement with and for everyone.
Finally, the current practicality confirms that collaborative efforts are available and that the efforts will contribute to fulfillment of the purpose of space exploration. Russia has far more experience in physiology of long-duration space flights than the United States. Richard Thomas, director of the Center for Strategic Technology at Texas A & M University argued against cooperation saying, “Yes, they [Russians] have a lot of experience. But it’s like so much of their science. The fruits of that work are very slim indeed. The United States, while far behind in launches and practical space applications, maintains a distinct technological advantage” (Warren 9). This is absolutely not a good reason for not cooperating, but it is an excellent reason to do cooperate instead. Russia can share its accumulated scientific results with the world and the United States can lead in turning these results into more substantial advantages for the benefit of all people. Another Russian expertise is the launching of heavy objects, which the United States has not tried since the mid-1970s. Delivering parts of the new international space station Alpha--planned to fully operate from 2003--could take as many as 18 U.S. space shuttle flights with risks of astronauts’ lives each time. However, use of Russia’s unmanned Energia booster, the most powerful in the world, would significantly reduce the launch number as well as the risk of losing human lives (Lemonick 50). Welcoming Russia in the space station program would surely reduce the world political tension, too, multiplying the benefit of cooperation. Furthermore, Russia has a very high success rate of spacecraft launching that continues to be an envy of the world. In 1993, Russia launched more spacecraft than the rest of the world combined and still had only half as many mission failures as did the United States (Pike 17). Europe can also contribute to the world. NASA currently has a proposal of about seven-year long manned lunar mission that is estimated to cost $13 billion. If NASA makes this mission a collaborative effort with ESA who would provide a habitation module and the Ariane launcher, the cost for the United States would drop to as low as an estimated $9 billion (Lenorovitz 42). This would not only be financially efficient but also expand the number of people who will benefit from the mission to Moon. With this many chances of multiplying and spreading the benefits of space exploration, everyone must call for further and further cooperation before any of these opportunities disappears.
The only option the nations of the world have is to cooperate if they are to make everyone’s life more exciting through the uniqueness and benefits of space exploration. Today, competition is out of concern. The purpose of competitors shifts from actually exploring space to just “victory”. Competition is destructive and it hardly ever achieves high efficiency. In addition, it never shares the excitement with everyone. In the future, competition must remain out of concern. Daniel Goldin, administrator of NASA, said early this year when the spacecraft of the United States and Russia performed the collaborative rendezvous, “This is about cooperation, not confrontation. Instead of aiming weapons at one another, we can work on peaceful projects to benefit all the people of Earth” (Neuharth A11). This indeed is the goal of humankind today, and everyone on Earth must work on it since it is for benefit of all. Today, so much of confrontation is between nations, but if there were no national distinctions on Earth, problems would be significantly less. The nations of the world must move toward global unification. To achieve this, cooperation in space will be an ideal approach since there exists no national border from the first place. The world must start working together now to gain as much benefit and excitement as possible and not waste any of the opportunities and time. Human beings never need to fear cooperating. The result will never be negative, but always positive as cooperation is always constructive.
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