Down to Earth
/
Astronaut Karen Nyberg in the International Space Station. (Source: NASA)
The Decline of the Space Program
Part 1 of 2
Starting when I was five, my brother and I would sometimes sneak out of bed at 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. to watch TV. Our usual TV fare consisted of cartoons and Star Trek: The Next Generation, but these early morning escapades were for something different. On those occasions, we would turn to the public access channel to watch something we found truly amazing: a Space Shuttle launch. These events could drag on for more than an hour with little activity and almost no sound or voice-over. There must have been something truly magical about such an event if what was effectively a still image could hold the attention of a five- and seven-year-old for so long. I grew up watching Star Trek, Star Wars, and most other science fiction I could get my hands on. The launch of a Space Shuttle was a chance to see real-world space heroes in action.
When I was a child, the space program was still making the headlines. Two years before I was born, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff. The first component of the International Space Station was launched when I was ten. Mir, which I had the good fortune of once seeing through a telescope, was decommissioned and destroyed when I was thirteen. When I was fifteen, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry. Finally, when I was 23, NASA launched the Space Shuttle for the last time.
The people who risked their lives in these voyages, and the engineers who made it possible, were rightly considered heroes. It was no surprise, then, that kids my age wanted to grow up to be astronauts. Children often dream of growing up to be superheroes, and astronauts still qualified as superheroes when I was young. Now, NASA’s budget is a shadow of what it once was, the United States has to hitch a ride with other countries in order to get people into space, and there are few exciting prospects for human space travel in the near future. Appreciation for space exploration and its impact on our culture have faded as I’ve grown up. The superheroes have fallen back to earth.
I believe one of the most crucial (and elusive) components of education is passion. If students cannot be excited about what they are learning, education becomes a far more difficult and unpleasant uphill battle. As an English teacher, I am more fortunate than some; many students have a passion for stories of one kind or another and I have many avenues for building on that interest. The STEM fields are not always so lucky. Particularly for students who struggle with math, the sciences can be intimidating and students can feel that they have no inroad into the complex work of science. There is no single solution to our students’ difficulties with science, but finding ways to excite a passion for science is an important part of addressing these issues.
In another life, I’d like to think I could have been a physicist. My love of science fiction, fondness of stargazing, and, maybe most significantly, my admiration for astronauts and the space program fueled my interests in science. Something like the United Federation of Planets was not likely to be created in my lifetime, but journeys to Mars and beyond didn’t seem so improbable. If I struggled less in math, maybe I would have pursued being an astrophysicist instead of an English major. NASA’s national presence declined as my struggles with math increased. While my difficulties in math were probably the biggest factor that deterred me from pursuing a career in science, I wonder how much I may have also been deterred by NASA’s disappearance from the headlines. At a time when America’s scientific literacy is suffering, we need all the help we can get in exciting students about the STEM fields.
In 2012, astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson gave a keynote speech at the 28th National Space Symposium discussing the decline of NASA and particularly human space flight. This speech charts areas Tyson believes the space program influenced: ranging from Doctors without Borders to the EPA to fins on cars in the 1950’s. One of the most important roles of the space program in our national consciousness was as a means to excite students about the STEM fields:
"[In the 1960’s], you didn’t need special programs to convince people that science was a good thing in school. You didn’t need special programs to show people that engineering and math - the STEM fields - that these are useful to society, to our identity as a nation, because the headlines that were writ large over that era had built into them the fact that innovation created those headlines: innovation brought to you by an ambitious community of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians."
"Space is hard, space is dangerous, space is exciting. Not only do you innovate, these innovation make headlines, and those headlines work their way down the educational pipeline. Everybody in school knows about it. You don’t have to set up a program to convince people that being an engineer is cool. They’ll know it, just by the cultural presence of those activities. You do that, it’ll jumpstart our dreams, that’s what it’ll do."
Tyson believes that reinvigorating innovation and a passion for the sciences needs to come from more than educational policy or teacher training. Without something like the space program, we lack programs and goals “befitting the depth of ambitions of [these] students,” as he says in an interview published in The Atlantic. We, as teachers, have an important role to play, but we can only be one part of the culture that is needed to support a passion for the sciences.
“Teacher training? We need that. It is a necessary but insufficient condition to make this happen [to build and keep a strong innovation culture in the United States]. You can have an awesome teacher in middle school, high school, now you want to become a scientist, you come out the other end of that educational pipeline. What do you do? We lost an entire generation of these smart people. They became like investment bankers or lawyers out of the 1980’s and 90’s, ‘cause there’s no place for them to take their interest in science. If you have big, bold, ambitious projects, you get them all. Especially since the NASA science portfolio involves biologists: we’re looking for life. It’s got chemists, geologists, astrophysicists, physicists. The NASA portfolio touches all of these. Not only that, we need the electrical engineers, the mechanical engineers, the structural engineers. NASA is a one agency showdown.”
According to recent studies, the performance of students in the United States is particularly weak when it comes to math. The PISA survey argues that “students in the United States have particular weaknesses in performing mathematics tasks with higher cognitive demands, such as taking real-world situations, translating them into mathematical terms, and interpreting mathematical aspects in real-world problems.” Our educational philosophies tend to strive towards purposeful lesson design and real-world application, but it seems math is one area that is falling short of these goals. Tyson’s argument implies that part of the problem may be a lack of excitement for math in the real world, that students have little opportunity to innovate in the science fields like space exploration and are instead drawn toward other math-heavy industries like banking and programming.
Private industry is, of course, crucial to our economy and many people aspire to do great things through private companies. It often seems that the private sector may hold the future of space exploration as SpaceX advances towards being a major supplier for the International Space Station and companies like Planetary Resources hope to begin mining asteroids. NASA seems to be fading into the background as shuttle flights have been discontinued and the International Space Station will be decommissioned around 2020. For my part, I find it hard to take pride in the space successes of private companies; they’re not something I can feel like I’m a part of. Even if I was never involved with NASA, it still felt like we, as Americans, were collectively making these strides. When it is an achievement of a private company, the success feels like something that’s happening to someone else, over there. Even if the achievements of private companies could excite students about the sciences, Tyson rejects the idea that the private sector is prepared to step into the vacuum, or even capable of doing so:
"Will space entrepreneurs lead the frontier in space, rather than NASA? The answer is: no! That cannot happen. It will not happen. Because space is expensive, it is dangerous, the risks are unquantified. You put all three of those together and you can’t say, 'okay, who’s in?' It doesn’t work that way. There’s no business model for a corporation to do something expensive with uncertain risks where you might die. Governments have historically taken on those first steps….In the 1960’s, low Earth orbit was a frontier for the nation. It is not a frontier anymore. So sure, let private enterprise have at it, provided that NASA still gets to go someplace beyond. Otherwise we’re just closing up shop.”
The Common Core, and most of our general education discourse, is often focused on career readiness and college preparation. I frequently hear complaints from my college freshmen about having to take classes that aren’t related to their degree or future career. Based on things like these complaints, and the majority of my students being business majors, college is a means to an economic end for many students. Ten years ago, in his book Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling, James Paul Gee argued that the “new capitalist world” is one that depends on employees marketing themselves to potential employers. He describes that “Millennials like school less with each passing year, but accept it as necessary for their future…precisely because they (and their parents) are aware of the role that educational credentials, especially from elite institutions, play in the new capitalist world.” When we have given students a world where economic gains are the hallmark of success, and when headlines are dominated by economic concerns and scientific discovery is pushed far out of the limelight, this attitude makes sense. In such a world, why shouldn’t they become investment bankers and lawyers? Even if they enter into academia, their time will be increasingly dominated by politics and economic issues as universities grapple with shrinking budgets and the prospect of shifting to a business model. Without something like the space program, we are giving students little reason to have anything but down-to-earth dreams.
As with the success of private enterprise, there is nothing wholly wrong with this attitude, but it does not align with what I believe the purpose of education to be. Nor does it align with most childhood dreams of becoming literal or figurative superheroes. According to a Forbes article published in 2008, “superhero” was the most popular career choice among the kindergarteners they interviewed (being published in Forbes, the dreams jobs had to be discussed in terms of prospective salaries). There will come a time when a student will accept that they cannot be Spiderman, but I believe it is in our best interest as a nation to give them a middle ground between Spiderman and an investment banker, to give them dreams of being the heroes I grew up adoring. Astronauts can’t be just smart, or just fit. It does not mean pigeonholing someone as a limited specialist. A great superhero is one who is smart, strong, and moral. No matter how much a child may dream, they’re not likely to become a superhero out of a comic book, but if our country gives them exciting reasons to get involved in the space program, being an astronaut may not have to be second best.
Enabling these dreams requires a culture that fosters them, and for the sciences I know of no better means than reinvesting in the space program. Tyson’s call to double NASA’s budget from about 0.5% of the federal budget to 1% would be a meaningful step forward, but a culture that supports exploration, innovation, and passion for the sciences cannot be constructed solely through legislation and budgeting. This has to be a social change as well as a budgetary one. A strong space program must arise out of a culture that supports the program's ideals, and in return it will reinforce a culture that values the sciences and the heroics necessary for human space exploration. Next time I will discuss the role I feel teachers outside of the STEM fields have in building this culture. While I agree with Tyson that our space exploration should not be limited to one destination or another, the example of the first crew that might voyage to Mars is a strong illustration of the kind of heroes the space program might build:
"We have built into our culture this concept of the 'right stuff.' I think it's a great bit of iconography of [the space] era. We milked it quite well, I think. Heroes are made out of this. I think that first crew, whatever its numbers...is a special class; they're doing what no one has done before. This is not a lottery. You want people who you want to emulate. You want people who did well in school. You want people who ate healthy. You want people who are moral. You want people who can become that next generation of heroes, because if they make it to Mars, and even if they don't, they're our heroes. They're our heroes in life and in death."
When students have these kinds of heroes to look up to, or even to someday become, teachers will have a substantial advantage in our own difficult mission of exciting students’ passions for the sciences and education as a whole. It is up to us as a society to help these superheroes take flight.
Works Consulted
Ewalt, David M. "When I Grow Up: Kids' Dream Jobs." Forbes. 1 Oct. 2008. Web. 6 August 2014.
Gee, James Paul. Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Heller, Chris. "Neil DeGrasse Tyson: How Space Exploration Can Make America Great Again." The Atlantic. The Atlantic Monthly Group, 5 March 2012. Web. 6 August 2014.
"ISS037-E-026900 (4 Nov. 2013)." Photograph. International Space Station Imagery. NASA, 2013. Web. 7 August 2014.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. "FAQ." nasa.gov. NASA, n. d. Web. 7 August 2014.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. "Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Results from PISA 2012: United States Key Findings." OECD, oecd.org. 2012. Web. 7 August 2014.
Planetary Resources. "Our Vision and Mission." planetaryresources.com. Planetary Resources, n. d. Web. 8 August 2014.
Tyson, Neil DeGrasse. "Launch Keynote." 28th National Space Symposium. Broadmoor Hotel, Colorado Springs, CO. 23 April 2012. Web. 8 August 2014.
