The Case for Space

Introduction:

All of us at one time or another have been overcome with the strange wonders of space. We have read The Right Stuff, we have watched Lost In Space and Star Trek and we ponder about UFOs. “Hey diddle diddle the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon.” The little dog wasn’t the only one who laughed at the thought – but no more.

Our guest speaker is the official spokesman for the great Canadian company, Spar Aerospace, which is engaged in design, development, manufacturing and servicing of systems for space, remote manipulation communications, defence, electro optics, and aviation markets. There are over 2,000 people employed in the company- including about 600 engineers and technicians representing one of the largest technological groups in the private sector in Canada. SPAR stands for Special Products and Applied Research. The Toronto-based company derives the bulk of its revenues from satellite machines but satellite manufacturing is not its only business. The $110-million Canadarm aboard NASA’s space shuttle Columbia is probably the most famous piece of non-satellite hardware. If you remember it was used to manipulate objects in the storage bay of the space shuttle. The company also manufactures aviation gears and transmissions and military surveillance equipment.

More recently Spar has also become a major player in the U.S. space program. In May 1988 Spar won a $31-million federal contract to complete preliminary work on Canada’s contribution to an international space station. Spar is the prime contractor for Canada’s contribution which is called a mobile servicing system which is to figure prominently in the construction and maintenance of the space station. The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the driving force behind the station. The U.S. is spending $14 to $18 billion in other nations including Canada and Japan and members of the European Space Agency will contribute about $7 billion U.S. The first components are expected to be lifted into orbit by the space shuttle in 1994. Our speaker said about the Canadian contribution: “What is remarkable is that for that amount, $1.2 billion, we have parlayed ourselves into a mission critical position. Construction should begin in spring 1989:” It is very exciting for Canada to have this involvement and it will give our country and Spar great recognition. Canadian astronauts have already been involved in experiments in space. Astronauts Roberta Bondar and Ken Money have been nominated for one position allocated to Canada on the first International Microgravity Laboratory space shuttle flight. A series of missions is planned to carry out experiments contributing to the space shuttle.

Before joining Spar in 1982, Mr. Trump had a 15-year career at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and he was Associate Dean. Prior to that he served as Information Director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration New York-based Institute for Space Studies. He was a lecturer for NASA’s National Education programs as well as holding several editorial positions. Mr. Trump has written Space-Canada In The Twentieth Century. He is a co-author of Education In Journalism and he has translated The New Tyranny, a book on nuclear energy. Mr. Trump is Membership Chairman of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association and Honorary President of the Ontario Science Teachers’ Association. He is also a director of P.J. Spratt Associates, Canadian Export Association, Outward Bound of Canada (and he loves the wilderness), the Ryerson Institute Board of Aeronautical Engineering and the University of Western Ontario School of Graduate Journalism.

Well, Christopher Trump has been leading us out of the wilderness with his wonderful writing and speeches, and once again he is going to take us on a journey and bring us safely down to earth.

Christopher Trump:

In the beginning the ages of man were identified by material – stone, bronze, and later, iron. They marked the means of the hunt and of conquest. In the more immediate past we record the Age of Exploration and the Industrial Age. Power was defined by the dimensions of farflung empires and the ability to out-produce others. A nation’s place in the sun was measured by its ability to garner the raw materials for its steel mills, shipyards and clothing factories.

Now, for the past quarter of a century or so, the Space Age defined a new benchmark for measuring nations’ abilities in a way that is uniquely human – that is, by applying the test of brainpower. It is at one and the same time an age of exploration and a conquest of the unknown. But this time there is no concomitant expansion of empires. Indeed, a 1967 treaty, signed by all members of the United Nations, renounced both weapons of mass destruction in space and the acquisition of extra-terrestrial territories.

From the outset space served as a highly visible arena where nations could demonstrate both leadership and dominance. Its explorations harness our aspirations – our sense of mission, if you will, to extend the human dimension. It is also a fertile place in which to do business -to better our condition here on earth through improved means of communications and surveillance.

It all began with the flight of Sputnik in 1957, a basketballsized satellite that did little more than go beep-beep-beep as it coursed through the heavens at eight km per second. The story is told by Cosmonaut Vladimir Dzhanibekov that it almost was not first. There were many competing committees in the Academy of Science, each with its own experiments to go aboard. Finally the project leader cut through the dilemma by announcing that none would be installed in Sputnik. The main thing was to get the satellite launched.

And was he ever right. By his insistence it came to pass that the Soviet Union was first and instantly catapulted itself from the backwaters of 19th Century technology – where conventional wisdom had it pegged – into the forefront of the 20th Century. There was huge consternation in the United States. First reports pooh-poohed the feat, noting – quite correctly – that Sputnik did nothing in orbit. In fact, an article in True Magazine even sketched out the notion that it was all an enormous hoax. But gradually it sank in that a new age – the

Age of Space – had been ushered in and that its architects were in the Soviet Union. There began in the late 50s an agonizing appraisal in the United States of what had gone wrong … in sum, the quest for a scapegoat.

It is a hallmark of the age that the finger of blame pointed to the educational establishment – that classrooms, labs and textbooks, teachers and students, were all deficient. It may have been the wrong reason, but few wanted to point the finger at the failure of will, which was the root cause of the under-funded U.S. effort to launch a satellite in time for the International Geophysical Year. But it resulted in the greatest outpouring of federal funds ever to revamp the U.S. education scene, with new textbooks, language and science labs, and teacher training. As a public school teacher at the time I recall only one thing that was left out of the mix – teachers’ salaries did not go up.

The greatest fringe benefit for the Soviet Union, too, was in the educational field. One example stands out. Prior to Sputnik the best and brightest graduate students in India invariably went to the United Kingdom and North America for further study. Within 10 years of Sputnik, half were going to the Soviet Union. That served as an enrichment of the Soviet academic scene that no world conquest could have rendered.

From the very outset the Soviet plan for space seems to have steered toward broad-based dominance. The nation clearly led in booster strength – the power of its rockets – and followed up Sputnik with the first dog in space, the first man in space and then the first woman. It launched scientific probes toward the Moon and Venus. In what, at the time, was a two-nation “race” for space it meant that the U.S. was consistently coming in second, or last. It was a challenge – the sort that the U.S. has traditionally been at its best in responding to. And respond it did. In the weeks after Sputnik its early launch attempts failed – events that the media shared with a global audience. This heightened the challenge and President Eisenhower forged NASA out of elements of the Air Force, Army and Navy as well as the National Advisory Council on

Aviation. A few months later, in early 1958, the world’s second satellite, the Explorer, was launched by a Jupiter rocket from Cape Canaveral. Its instrument payload detected the radiation belts around the world, named for their discoverer, Dr. James Van Allen.

By the early 60s the political fallout from the Soviet dominance was beginning to hurt. It was President John Kennedy who forged the plan and sparked the public imagination to wrest U.S. leadership in space – the program to land men on the Moon and return them safely before the end of the decade. It was bold, imaginative and it worked. To this day the Apollo Program stands as one of the great achievements of the 20th Century. NASA’s budget swelled to more than five per cent of the federal budget, with a congruent drop in military space spending. There were few who questioned that U.S. leadership in space was secured when in July, 1969, the word came back from the Moon: The Eagle has landed.

The Apollo missions also stand as the unvarnished expression of space as a mission – as an ocean to explore with even less material motivation than Jason had in his quest for the Golden Fleece.

But this sense of mission also had its downside. After Apollo, NASA’s budget plunged well below one per cent of the U.S. federal budget. Today the military space budget is twice as much. As one NASA official recently noted in reflecting on his agency’s current woes, we were victims of the F.F.Q. formula. By that he meant: Flags and Footsteps, Quickly!

It is one thing to secure the heights and establish leadership in space. It is quite another matter to sustain public interest in something that is largely allegorical in its dimension and discretionary in terms of tax dollars invested.

Would men have landed on the Moon in this century had it not been for Sputnik? No one will ever know. But the fact that they have done so – and that they were Americans – has resulted in a “mission accomplished” atmosphere that is difficult to shake. Recently McDonnell-Douglas, one of the prime contractors for the Freedom Space Station, prepared a 30-second television ad that depicted the Soviet space station and noted dryly at the conclusion: Shouldn’t we be there too? Interestingly, two of the three major networks turned the ad down as too controversial. Yet, even if it had been shared as widely as are soda pop commercials, the subliminal response of many viewers might well have been: So, what’s the rush – the Soviets haven’t been to the Moon yet, have they?

Let’s flash back a bit, once again, to 1962 – the year the mighty Apollo program was launched. Enter Canada as the third nation to place a satellite into orbit and with it the outline of yet another dimension of the Space Age – space as a place in which to make better our lives here on earth.

Canada’s first satellite, the Alouette, was eminently practical in its purpose. The brainchild of Dr. John H. Chapman and his colleagues at the Defence Research Establishment, it was designed to tell us more about the ionosphere, a critical layer of the atmosphere that made possible long-distance radio communication. Its data resulted in more than 300 scientific papers, which made it the most successful of all the early satellites.

As the railroads at the end of the last century helped link us together as a nation, so Dr. Chapman pursued the idea that space was a natural environment with which to link, through communications, Canada’s 10 million square kilometers. By placing into geostationary orbit communications satellites we could make calls from Toronto to Inuvik as easily as across town and see the same evening’s news in Montreal as well as Resolute. The first of these satellites – in fact the world’s first in commercial service to a nation – was launched 10 years after Alouette, in 1972. The Anik A served Canada’s needs. However, it was made in the United States.

Chapman pushed hard the concept that Canada should also build for space. Thanks to enlightened government policy and the response of private industry to accept the challenge, by 1982 the Anik D was made in Canada. In that same year the contract was signed for Canadian enterprise to build for Brazil Latin America’s satellite communications system.

Sadly, Chapman died at age 59 in 1979, too soon to personally savour the results of his strategy, which was to make Canada an international competitor in space communications.

Today space communication is the one profitable spinoff of the Space Age. Telesat Canada has been consistently profitable since its inception in 1972. At the moment it is funding from its own resources the Anik E which, when launched in 1990, will be the most powerful and versatile such satellite in service over North America.

Space, then, is a place for business. But it still serves that broader sense of mission. At the moment NASA’s international space station challenges the skills of engineers in the United States, the nations of Europe, Japan and Canada. Scheduled for construction in the mid-90s, some 24 shuttle flights will carry aloft the struts and structures for assembly of a base 300 kilometers above earth. Eventually it will be the size of three football fields. This means, so large that it will be visible day or night.

With experimental labs provided by the U.S., Europe and Japan, Canada’s role will be to supply the Mobile Servicing Centre, a robotic device with three times the capacity of the Canadarm. It will assist in the construction of the space station and upon completion be available for overhaul and repair services.

A commitment by the Canadian government of more than $1 billion over the next 10 years, the space station represents for all of the nations involved the largest peacetime engineering project ever undertaken. For the first time human beings will be a permanent fixture in space, with crews alternating to do research and scientific exploration. Designed to last for 30 years, Space Station Freedom, as it is called, holds the key for unlocking doors, the very existence of which we can only guess at.

Space as a place and as a mission. To advance technology, the Space Age needs a mix of both. Canada did so in the mid70s when it contributed to the shuttle program with the Canadarm project. This was followed by the naming of six

Canadians as astronauts – selected from more than 4,000 applicants. The presence of these six, more than all of the technological feats of the unmanned satellites, has helped enormously to focus public attention on our role as a spacefaring nation. The reason for this, of course, is quite simple: People relate to people – certainly by far more than to machines.

At the moment the nation that seems to understand this best is France. Its leadership has tapped a wellspring of popular enthusiasm for space that translates itself into a $1billion annual space budget-the highest per capita of any of the OECD nations. France accounts for fully 31 per cent of the European Space Agency budget – Germany is next with 27 per cent, Italy with 14 per cent, with Britain barely a sustaining member at eight per cent. It is France that has pushed hard for an independent European booster – the Ariane rockets launched from Kourou, French Guiana. But that was only a prelude to Europe’s ability to place its own astronauts aloftthe Hermes space shuttle. A full-scale mock-up is on display at the Toulouse space centre, replete with all of the European flags (minus that of the United Kingdom) and that of Canada, an associate member of ESA.

At the outset I had noted that the hallmark of the Space Age is brainpower. That is also its greatest promise. As a beacon for our brightest young people it will surpass all of the benefits to date, be they improved communications or footsteps on the Moon.

For example, this past summer the first session of the International Space University was held in Boston at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The dream of three young men – two Americans, Peter Diamandis and Todd Hawley, and a Canadian, Bob Richards – the ISU raised more than $1 million in one year and attracted more than 300 applicants from 24 nations. Ten Canadians were among the first, their financing covered by the Canadian International Space University Foundation, a partnership of government and private funding to provide the $10,000 fee for each. The foundation served as a model for other nations to follow suit and the young students came from all over the world – 28 from the United States, 16 from European nations, 12 from the Soviet Union, 6 from China, among others. The 240 hours of lectures covered topics from lunar mining to space law. Included in the international faculty were two from Canada – Professors Rod Tennyson and Nicolas Matte, respectively from the University of Toronto’s Aerospace Studies Institute and McGill University’s Aerospace Law Institute.

In some ways the International Space University is symbolic of the best that the Space Age has to offer – the engagement in common purpose of outstanding young scholars from around the world. Just as nations now vie with one another for the honour to host the Olympic Games, so in time they will compete for the privilege to host the ISU. Such a competition is already in the works for this summer, with Strasbourg, France, beating out competitors in Toulouse and Aachen, West Germany.

The case for space, then, can be summed up in three ways:

First, it is the ultimate frontier in which to extend the human dimension, with the high promise of increased international co-operation in such ventures.

Second, it is a singular vantage point to advance communications, scientific research and new processes in manufacturing.

Finally – and most importantly – space serves as a beacon for our young men and women to invest their keen minds and aspirations in fulfilling careers here in Canada.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by John Freyseng; Partner, Blaney, McMurtry, Stapells, and a Director of the Empire Club of Canada.