Worth the Price?

October 8, 1962

For the fiscal year 1963 the Space Director is asking for nearly $4 billion for his agency alone. Before the race to the moon is finished, the program is expected to cost $20 billion or more.

This is a huge sum. How will it be raised? By higher taxes? But taxes already take away from the corporations more than half of what they earn, and from individuals up to 91 percent of what they earn. As President Kennedy has already told us: “Our present tax system is a drag on economic recovery and economic growth. . . . Our tax rates, in short, are so high as to weaken the very essence of the progress of a free society—the incentive for additional return for additional effort.” Will the money be raised by deficit financing—i.e., by piling up our national debt still further, by printing more money? That way lies more inflation, further undermining confidence in the dollar.

Of course we must spend whatever is needed on national defense. And it is difficult to view the civilian space program entirely apart from missile and other military programs. Just as what was discovered in developing intercontinental missiles made the civilian space program possible, so the civilian program may in turn lead to discoveries of military application. Yet military advances are more likely to be achieved, and sooner and more cheaply, if they are aimed at directly.

DIVERSION OF EFFORT

The space program may also lead to other incidental scientific discoveries and technical advances. It has already led to Telstar, with its immediately dramatic results and immense future possibilities. Scientists point to other potential benefits: Weather observation and prediction, more accurate navigation, improved mapping and miniaturization, new processes and materials.

Yet when all this has been said, the question remains whether these incidental or possible by-products will be enough to justify the huge spending, the huge diversion of national effort, that the space program involves.

Some basic questions are involved. Is it an appropriate function of government to engage in or finance scientific research? To what extent will government research programs supplement private research? To what extent are they likely, in the long run, merely to displace private research? And if the government is to take over the business of scientific research, how will it decide on the relative usefulness or urgency of a thousand different projects?

MORE URGENT PROJECTS

It might be interesting and even exciting to land a man on the moon, but it would not be difficult to think of more necessary, urgent, or useful projects: Research to increase food production (notwithstanding our own insane farm program) to provide more and cheaper nourishment for the world’s 3 billion population. Developing new and cheaper sources of power. Attacking a hundred human diseases, from cancer to the common cold, and prolonging human life. Finding cheaper and better ways to decontaminate air and water, or to turn salt water into fresh. Research on weather control, to mitigate floods and droughts, or to dissipate smog over cities. And scores of other projects that from the standpoint of increasing human happiness or reducing human misery seem to deserve priority over the Buck Rogers stunt of landing a man on the moon.

It is, indeed, not easy to find a satisfactory answer to the questions raised by former President Eisenhower: “Why the great hurry to get to the moon and the planets?” Are we merely engaged in “a mad effort to win a stunt race?” If we are in a race with Soviet Russia for world “prestige,” should we let the Communists set the terms and the items?

Suppose, one day, after we have spent many billions in trying to land men on the moon, the Russians get there first?—a not improbable outcome, judging by experience to date. Then our billions of expenditures will acquire a negative value. Our prestige will be lower than if we had never entered the race. And meanwhile we will have diverted world attention (and our own) from our immeasurable superiorities in the things that matter most—human freedom and dignity and standards of living.