A six-foot cutout of Jar Jar Binks greets me at the local Pizza Hut these days, demanding that I buy "Star Wars" merchandise of every kind. For just $6.99 I can buy a dollar's worth of candy wrapped in a few more cents' worth of plastic shaped as a "Star Wars" action figure. What a waste... The $400 to $600 million "Phantom Menace" will make at the box office is nothing compared to merchandise sales, which will probably total in the billions range. I'm not complaining about George Lucas' cashing in, I have long been a fan of the "Star Wars" trilogy, not to mention many other science fiction movies. What bothers me is that as a nation, we spend far more to entertain ourselves with space-themed illusions than we spend towards actually achieving a meaningful human presence in space.
"The Phantom Menace" earned millions its first week in theaters, enough to build a section of the International Space Station. In one year the money earned through the "Phantom" marketing menace will most likely meet, if not exceed the budget required to actually build the ISS and operate it for a few years. It's not that we're spending too much on space entertainment, it's that we're investing far too little in the real thing. As movie budgets for sci-fi films have increased exponentially over the past years, the budget for our only space agency, NASA, has rapidly declined. NASA has done remarkable things in this time, but it has simply not received the money it takes to undergo the most basic of problems confronting would-be space exploration. First among these is the high price of getting into space. It costs about $10,000 per pound to put something in space using the Space Shuttle, and about $3,000 to $5,000 per pound using a cheaper "expendable" rocket. No wonder there are no "space hotels" in orbit yet. Why this horrific cost? Simple. What we are flying to space was never intended to fly for cheap. And we haven't provided NASA with adequate funding to invent something better. For Example, the Space Shuttle design is 30 years old. Scary, isn't it? The most technilogically advanced vehicle in the world is 30 years old. The U.S. hasn't developed a major new space vehicle, or even an engine for one, in more than three decades. The solid rocket boosters, which burn their fuel and fall into the ocean when they finish are even worse. These space tugs have been endlessly patched and repaired, and slightly improved (only to prevent more disasters), and their fundamental designs and technology are nearly a half-century old. To paraphrase The Emperor in Return of the Jedi, "We are paying the price for our lack of vision."
There is much more at stake than the price of an E ticket to earth orbit. The cost of getting into space affects the cost of everything from global telecommunications, to micro-gravity research, to national security space systems. More than half the cost of orbiting a commercial communication satellite goes to buying and insuring the launch vehicle, costs that show up in your phone bill, your cable TV bill, your direct-to-home satellite service. Imagine you are NASA, trying to perform your core mission of exploring the unknown. Or that you are the Air Force, performing space-based national security missions. More than half of your budget is gone for "transportation" before you've designed or built the first satellite, robotic probe or space telescope. Luke Skywalker would never have gotten off Tatooine like this.
The "Phantom Menace" that threatens our real-life future in space is, in the end, our own laziness. Our nation of couch potatoes is satisfied with being spectators rather than doers (yours truly included). If we invest half as much on real space activities as we do on the made-for-TV variety; missions to Mars, Lunar vacations and thousands of practical new technologies from space are possible within a decade. The immediate need is for an intense and focused national effort to revolutionize space transportation.
May the Force be with us.