Astrophysicist to offer rants, reflections
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s talk on the “delusions of space enthusiasts” is kind of like a two-hour rant with visual aides, the astrophysicist proclaimed.
Why is NASA returning to the moon? Because China wants to go to the moon.
Will SpaceX, founded by billionaire Elon Musk, send the first humans to Mars? Only if China is also competing to go and NASA pays for it.
Are suborbital flights that provide a few minutes of weightlessness really taking people into space? Not really.
“The talk is a reality check on what everyone is saying, thinking and doing,” Tyson said in an interview ahead of his performance Monday at Jones Hall. He’ll be providing the talk with Performing Arts Houston at 7:30 p.m. “I think it’s fun,” he said. “I’m having fun up there. I like to think of it as geek night out.”
The impetus for this speech, one of many Tyson gives around the country, is the mismatch between where people think humanity should be in space and where it actually is. Before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, in 1957, many people thought it would be 200 years before humans walked on the moon. But the Cold War propelled Americans to reach that milestone in 1969.
“After Sputnik, people started overpredicting,” Tyson said. “So right when we were on the cusp of landing on the moon, people were saying, ‘Oh, at this rate we’ll be on Mars by 1985.’ And of course, that didn’t happen.”
Americans like to think we’re explorers and trailblazers. But when it comes to space, Tyson said, a lot of our decisions have been spurred by politics. The Soviet Union had the first satellite, mammal and human in orbit. NASA was reacting to that pressure during the Apollo Program, which it canceled quickly after reaching the moon. There was no longer a geopolitical force motivating the United States.
President George W. Bush tried to get NASA to return to the moon, but those plans were canceled by President Barack Obama before being revived by President Donald Trump.
Tyson says we’re returning now because China is trying to go.
“Is anyone saying that? Not really,” Tyson said. “Because we don’t want to be viewed as reactive to geopolitical forces. We like thinking that we’re explorers. We’re Americans. We’re proactive. These are the delusions that we have been living under for 60 years. And I feel compelled to highlight this for people so that they fully understand what’s going on and why.”
He doesn’t just talk about the moon. In 2012, Felix Baumgartner jumped from a stratospheric balloon at a height of 128,000 feet with the Red Bull Stratos’ Mission to the Edge of Space.
“How high above a schoolroom globe did he jump? The thickness of a dime,” Tyson said. “At that elevation, you’re not seeing the curvature of the Earth. Period. And you really want to call that the edge of space?”
The International Space Station is only three-eighth of an inch above a classroom globe.
But there are space realities that Tyson revels in, too. He loves to tell people how satellites enable their daily life. Satellites enable banking and military operations. They allow people to track their Amazon package, use GPS to visit Grandma and find a date within 100 yards of where they’re standing.
“My favorite thing is reflecting on how different our lives would be without a space program,” Tyson said. “And not enough people know that. I think Houston people know it. Houston people, whether they know it or not, are way more space fluent.”