The main problems of human space exploration. For a solution - to space Problems that can be solved with the help of space

Powerful forces are conspiring against you - gravity in particular. If an object above the Earth's surface wants to fly freely, it must literally shoot upward at speeds in excess of 25,000 miles per hour. This entails large financial costs.

For example, it took almost $200 million to launch the Curiosity rover to Mars. And if we talk about a mission with crew members, the amount will increase significantly.

The reusable use of flying ships will help save money. Rockets, for example, were designed to be reusable. and as we know, there are already attempts at a successful landing.

2. Flight

Flying through space is easy. This is a vacuum, after all; nothing slows you down. But when launching a rocket, difficulties arise. The greater the mass of an object, the more force is needed to move it, and rockets have enormous mass. Chemical rocket fuel is great for the initial boost, but the precious kerosene burns out in minutes. Pulse acceleration will make it possible to reach Jupiter in 5-7 years. That's a hell of a lot of in-flight movies. We need a radical new method for developing airspeed.

Congratulations! You have successfully launched a rocket into orbit. But before you break out into space, out of nowhere a piece of an old satellite appears and crashes into your fuel tank. That's it, the rocket is gone.

It's a space debris problem, and it's very real. The US Space Surveillance Network has detected 17,000 objects - each the size of a football - racing around the Earth at speeds of more than 17,500 miles per hour; and almost 500,000 more pieces smaller than 10 cm. Launch adapters, lens caps, even a spot of paint can crater critical systems.

Whipple shields - layers of metal and Kevlar - can protect against tiny parts, but nothing can save you from an entire satellite. There are about 4,000 of them in Earth's orbit, most of whom died in the air. Flight control helps you avoid dangerous paths, but it's not perfect.

It's not realistic to push them out of orbit - it would take an entire mission to get rid of just one dead satellite. So now all satellites will fall from orbit on their own. They would jettison extra fuel and then use rocket boosters or a solar sail to fly down toward Earth and burn up in the atmosphere.

4. Navigation

The “Open Space Network,” antennas in California, Australia, and Spain, are the only navigation tool for space. Everything that is launched into space, from student project satellites to the New Horizons probe wandering through the Copeyre Belt, depends on them.

But with more missions, the network becomes crowded. The switch is often busy. So in the near future, NASA is working to lighten the load. Atomic clocks on the ships themselves would cut transmission times in half, allowing distances to be calculated with a single transmission of information from space. And the increased capacity of lasers will handle larger packets of data, such as photos or video messages.

But the further the rockets move away from Earth, the less reliable this method becomes. Of course, radio waves travel at the speed of light, but transmissions into deep space still take several hours. And the stars can show you the direction, but they are too far away to show you where you are.

Deep space navigation expert Joseph Ginn wants to design an autonomous system for future missions that would collect images of targets and nearby objects and use their relative locations to triangulate spacecraft coordinates without requiring any ground control.

It will be like GPS on Earth. You install a GPS receiver on your car and the problem is solved.

5. Radiation

Outside the safe cocoon of Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field, cosmic radiation awaits you, and it's deadly. Besides cancer, it can also cause cataracts and possibly Alzheimer's disease.

When subatomic particles hit the aluminum atoms that make up the spacecraft's body, their nuclei explode, releasing more ultra-fast particles called secondary radiation.

Solution to the problem? One word: plastic. It is light and strong, and it is full of hydrogen atoms, whose small nuclei do not produce much secondary radiation. NASA is testing a plastic that could mitigate radiation in spacecraft or space suits.

Or how about this word: magnets. Scientists on the space radiation project “Superconductivity Shield” are working on magnesium diboride – a superconductor that would deflect charged particles away from the ship.

6. Food and water

Last August, astronauts on ISS ate some lettuce they grew in space for the first time. But large-scale landscaping in zero gravity is difficult. Water floats around in bubbles instead of seeping through the soil, so engineers invented ceramic pipes to direct water down to plant roots.

Some vegetables are already quite space-efficient, but scientists are working on a genetically modified dwarf plum that is less than a meter tall. Proteins, fats and carbohydrates can be replenished by eating more varied crops - like potatoes and peanuts.

But it will all be in vain if you run out of water. (The ISS's urine and water recycling system requires periodic repairs, and interplanetary crews won't be able to rely on restocking new parts.) GMOs can help here, too. Michael Flynn, an engineer at NASA Research Center, is working on a water filter made from genetically modified bacteria. He compared it to the way the small intestine processes what you drink. Basically you are a water recycling system with a useful life of 75 or 80 years.

7. Muscles and bones

Weightlessness wreaks havoc on the body: certain immune cells are unable to do their jobs and red blood cells explode. It promotes kidney stones and makes your heart lazy.

Astronauts on ISS train to combat muscle atrophy and bone loss, but they still lose bone mass in space, and those spinning cycles of zero gravity don't help other problems. Artificial gravity would fix all this.

In his laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, former astronaut Lawrence Young conducts tests on a centrifuge: subjects lie on their sides on a platform and pedal with their feet on a stationary wheel, while the entire structure gradually spins around its axis. The resulting force acts on the astronauts' legs, vaguely reminiscent of gravitational influence.

Yang's simulator is too limited, it can be used for more than an hour or two a day, for constant gravity, the entire spacecraft would have to become a centrifuge.

8. Mental health

When a person has a stroke or heart attack, doctors sometimes lower the patient's temperature, slowing their metabolism to reduce the damage from lack of oxygen. This is a trick that could work for astronauts too. Traveling interplanetary for a year (at least), living in a cramped spaceship with bad food and zero privacy is a recipe for space madness.

This is why John Bradford says we should sleep during space travel. President of engineering firm SpaceWorks and co-author of a report for NASA on long missions, Bradford believes that cryogenically freezing crews would cut down on food, water, and prevent crew mental breakdown.

9. Landing

Hello planet! You have been in space for many months or even several years. The distant world is finally visible through your porthole. All you have to do is land. But you're careening through frictionless space at 200,000 miles per hour. Oh yeah, and then there's the planet's gravity.

The landing problem is still one of the most pressing that engineers have to solve. Remember the unsuccessful one to Mars.

10. Resources

When spaceships go on a long journey, they will take supplies with them from Earth. But you can't take everything with you. Seeds, oxygen generators, perhaps a few machines for infrastructure construction. But the settlers will have to do the rest themselves.

Luckily, space is not completely barren. “Every planet has all the chemical elements, although the concentrations differ,” says Ian Crawford, a planetary scientist at Birkbeck, University of London. The moon has a lot of aluminum. Mars has quartz and iron oxide. Nearby asteroids are a big source of carbon and platinum ores - and water, once pioneers figure out how to explode matter in space. If the fuses and drillers are too heavy to carry on the ship, they will have to extract the fossils by other methods: melting, magnets or metal-digesting microbes. And NASA is exploring a 3D printing process to print entire buildings - and there will be no need to import special equipment.

11. Research

Dogs helped humans colonize the Earth, but they wouldn't have survived on Earth. To spread into the new world, we will need a new best friend: a robot.

Colonizing a planet requires a lot of hard work, and robots can dig all day long without having to eat or breathe. Current prototypes are large and bulky and have difficulty moving on the ground. So the robots would have to be different from us; it could be a lightweight, steerable bot with backhoe-shaped claws, designed by NASA to dig up ice on Mars.

However, if the work requires dexterity and precision, then human fingers are indispensable. Today's space suit is designed for weightlessness, not for walking on an exoplanet. NASA's Z-2 prototype has flexible joints and a helmet that gives a clear view of any fine-grained wiring needs.

12. Space is huge

The fastest thing humans have ever built is a probe called Helios 2. It is no longer operational, but if there was sound in space, you would hear it scream as it still orbits the sun at speeds greater than 157,000 miles per hour. That's nearly 100 times faster than a bullet, but even at that speed it would take approximately 19,000 years to reach our closest star, Alpha Centauri. During such a long flight, thousands of generations would change. And hardly anyone dreams of dying of old age in a spaceship.

To beat time we need energy - a lot of energy. Perhaps you could get enough helium 3 on Jupiter for fusion (after we invent fusion engines, of course). Theoretically, near-light speeds can be achieved using the energy of annihilation of matter and antimatter, but doing this on Earth is dangerous.

“You would never want to do this on Earth,” says Les Johnson, a NASA technician who works on crazy Starship ideas. “If you do it in outer space and something goes wrong, you don't destroy the continent.” Too much? What about solar energy? All you need is a sail the size of Texas.

A much more elegant solution to cracking the source code of the universe is using physics. Miguel Alcubierre's theoretical drive would compress spacetime in front of your ship and expand it behind it, so you could travel faster than the speed of light.

Humanity will need a few more Einsteins working in places like the Large Hadron Collider to untangle all the theoretical knots. It is quite possible that we will make some discovery that will change everything, but this breakthrough is unlikely to save the current situation. If you want more discoveries, you have to invest more money in them.

13. There is only one Earth

A couple of decades ago, science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson sketched out a future utopia on Mars, built by scientists from an overpopulated, overextended Earth. His “Mars Trilogy” made a powerful push for colonization. But, in fact, besides science, why do we strive for space?

The need to explore is embedded in our genes, this is the only argument - the pioneering spirit and the desire to find out our purpose. “A few years ago, dreams of conquering space occupied our imagination,” recalls NASA astronomer Heidi Hummel. - We spoke the language of brave space explorers, but everything changed after the New Horizons station in July 2015. The whole diversity of worlds in the solar system has opened up before us.”

What about the fate and purpose of humanity? Historians know better. The expansion of the West was a land grab, and the great explorers were mainly in it for resources or treasure. Human wanderlust is expressed only in the service of political or economic desire.

Of course, the impending destruction of the Earth may be an incentive. Exhaust the planet's resources, change the climate, and space will become the only hope for survival.

But this is a dangerous line of thinking. This creates moral hazard. People think that if we do, we can start from scratch somewhere on Mars. This is a wrong judgment.

As far as we know, Earth is the only habitable place in the known universe. And if we are going to leave this planet, then this should be our desire, and not the result of a hopeless situation.

Man's entry into space is an important turning point in the history of the development of human society. It expands the sphere of reason, the sphere of interaction between nature and society. There is no doubt that in the future man will further explore outer space, including all the celestial bodies of the Solar System. The prediction of the great K. E. Tsiolkovsky will come true - space will bring people “mountains of bread and an abyss of power.”

Man's entry into space has changed our traditional ideas about the relationship between nature and society. Cosmonautics most directly influences earthly affairs and already today helps people of various specialties in their work.

For the first time in the world, a manned orbital scientific station "Salyut" was created in the USSR. A reliable vehicle has been developed for the delivery of crews, scientific equipment, and systems that support human life. The ability to carry out preventive and repair work at the station allows us to hope that a person will be able to stay at it for a sufficiently long time. This marks a new qualitative stage in human space exploration.

One of the main tasks of astronautics in the near future is the exploration of outer space and our planet; but the most important and most difficult task is to carry out applied work in the interests of many sectors of the national economy, and above all work on the study of the Earth’s natural resources and meteorology.

Man is exploring space. And a natural consequence of the general progress of astronautics and at the same time an indispensable condition for true space exploration is an increase in the duration of manned space flights. Naturally, the main means of exploring near-Earth space is a long-term manned orbital station.

A characteristic feature of modern socialist society is the desire to make maximum use of science for the accelerated development of the productive forces of society necessary to satisfy the material and spiritual needs of man. The general line of the Soviet space research program is using the achievements of astronautics for the needs of the national economy, for scientific and technological progress. The creation of the productive forces of society in space is the main feature of the current stage of human space exploration, the main task of long-term orbital manned stations.

What will long-term manned orbital stations give to the people of Earth? What applied work can crews of astronauts perform while on board the station?

Now we can clearly define two directions of such work. Firstly, visual overview of the face of the planet, in particular, unexpectedly emerging and rapidly occurring processes on it. Secondly, research and study of the Earth's natural resources.

Observations and photographing of the atmosphere help to study the structure of clouds, make weather forecasts, and timely detect storms, storms, and cyclones.

Equally important is the use of such stations to prevent catastrophic droughts and floods. Cosmonauts help hydrologists study open and closed reservoirs, the boundaries of the occurrence and thickness of snow cover in the mountains, fluctuations in the water regime of rivers, and also make forecasts for low- and high-water periods. Such forecasts are necessary for the construction of hydraulic structures and their proper operation, to prevent floods. Cosmonauts help hydrologists clarify maps of hydrological currents - the transfer of water masses across the surface of the World Ocean. These maps are necessary so that ships can bypass powerful currents and save time and fuel. Work in space will help hydrologists create maps of thermal zones and currents in which the fishing fleet is interested. In the future, these maps will significantly reduce material costs and time spent searching for areas suitable for fishing.

Space photography is important for searching for minerals, for studying the nature and intensity of modern tectonic and physical-geological processes, for clarifying maps of vast and inaccessible areas of Africa, Asia and the Antarctic mountain ranges. These studies help geologists determine the patterns of formation of geological structures that determine the distribution of minerals.

From the orbital station, geographers can study the state of various types of natural formations of the Earth, the surface of the land, the topography of the bottom of the World Ocean and will ultimately be able to solve the problem of the origin of the continents. Modern geographical maps are several years behind the real picture of the Earth. Space exploration will help significantly reduce this gap. Using space photography, you can also assess the state of water, forest and land resources in individual geographic regions of the Earth.

Cosmonautics opens up broad prospects for agriculture. Observations from space of fields simultaneously in different climatic zones and analysis of soil erosion make it possible to correctly use new lands, place crops and plantings on the most favorable soil conditions and water supply. Preventing soil erosion and catastrophic destruction during dust storms, forecasting harvests, increasing the efficiency of using new lands - these are the possible results of space geoscience methods.

From the spacecraft it will be possible to transmit information about the occurrence of fires.

The development of astronautics creates an excellent experimental basis for solving fundamental problems of science and technology. The implementation of a number of technical, astrophysical and medical-biological experiments in space caused a whole range of scientific discoveries and brought invaluable information about the laws and phenomena of nature. Is modern physics conceivable without fast protons and electrons, without the deepest vacuum, temperatures close to absolute zero, without plasma? But all this in its natural form can only be found in space. It is possible to simulate cosmic processes on Earth, but this possibility is limited primarily by the conditions of the Earth themselves. Therefore, in order to accelerate the pace of development of science and technology, it is necessary to go into space and study the conditions and processes occurring there.

Space research has already led to many scientific discoveries that have significantly changed our understanding of space and Earth. Cosmonautics has made the objects of direct study the radiation belts, the upper atmosphere and magnetosphere of the Earth, interplanetary gas, circumsolar space, the Sun, Moon, Venus, Mars, the stars of our Galaxy, other planets of the Solar system, nebulae, etc. New branches of science have appeared: space physics , space chemistry, selenology, planetology, space geodesy, space meteorology, space biology and medicine, etc. Space exploration also contributes to the development of various types of technology: cryogenic (using ultra-low temperatures), vacuum, radiation, high temperatures and pressures, etc.

Scientific discoveries made in the process of space exploration are widely introduced into many industries. Already several thousand types of earthly products owe their existence to the exploration of extraterrestrial space, the development of rockets and spacecraft. Space exploration promotes automation of production, microminiaturization, increased reliability and high precision of products. Energy generators have appeared that, with very little weight and high reliability, have large energy reserves. These are radioisotope generators, nuclear and solar batteries, fuel cells, which are successfully used on Earth, for example, in desert areas. New materials have appeared, in particular transparent ones with the strength of steel, or the so-called composite (composite), which are lighter and stronger than aluminum, dozens of types of ultra-pure metals and alloys, heat-shielding materials designed to work at high temperatures, high-strength plates, etc.

Fundamental changes have also occurred in the field of automatic control and production organization. The experience gained in organizing space programs also turns out to be valuable in solving problems of managing other “large systems” of a purely terrestrial nature. Thus, systematic space exploration contributes to the development of productive forces and the solution of fundamental problems of science and the national economy of the country with new means.

The Soviet space program provides for the exploration of space both by automatic means and with the help of manned spacecraft. The choice and implementation of a particular space project are dictated by the contribution it makes to the solution of fundamental scientific and economic problems. In the Soviet program for the development of space research, automatic vehicles are assigned the research task of studying near-Earth space, the Moon, and planets. For example, space machines of the Zond, Cosmos, Venus, and Mars series successfully solve important scientific problems. Without sending its representatives outside the planet, humanity, with the help of technical means, receives very valuable information from space about the Earth and space objects. In addition, flights of automatic “cosmonauts” are cheaper than manned ones; the size and weight of automatic “cosmonauts” can be smaller than that of manned spacecraft, not to mention the fact that such flights completely eliminate the risk to human life. The advantages of automata are undeniable, especially in the study of the planets of the solar system; at least in the near future, slot machines will remain out of competition.

It should be noted that automatic spacecraft, which help solve various purely scientific issues, create the basis for serial spacecraft for applied purposes: meteorological satellites "Meteor", communication satellites "Molniya-1" and "Molniya-2", navigation satellites, satellites for research natural resources of the Earth, etc. These machines have been serving people for many years. Nowadays, almost 30 million residents of the Far East, Siberia, the Far North and Central Asia use long-distance space communications - they watch Central Television programs relayed through the Molniya-1 satellites and the Orbita network of ground stations. Meteorological satellites of the Meteor system help make accurate weather forecasts for several days in advance, which is so important for agriculture, transport, construction, etc.

The creation and launch of automatic devices also help solve complex technical issues and develop systems for manned spacecraft. And the use of automation on manned spacecraft, in turn, ensures the progress of automatic research and applied devices.

Man goes into space on manned spacecraft. After the automata pave the way for him, he solves a more complex and more important problem - the problem of space exploration. A spacecraft is not just a vehicle, it is a laboratory in space, and the astronaut on board must carry out an extensive program of space exploration. During the flight, the astronaut should be relieved as much as possible from the duties of controlling the spacecraft and spend most of the time conducting scientific experiments and research. Therefore, the control of the spacecraft is entrusted to various automatic systems. This is also true from the point of view of the safety of the first test flights of the new spacecraft.

When testing manned spacecraft, there is an unshakable rule: first, several of its unmanned counterparts are launched. This increases the flight safety of astronauts and at the same time fully ensures the progress of automatic spacecraft of various classes.

The complexity of a spacecraft is determined by the complexity of the mission that the astronauts must perform in flight, as well as how reliable all of the ship's systems are.

A modern spaceship is a highly complex cybernetic device. When controlling the ship during various operations (orientation of the ship, maneuver, docking, etc.), the astronaut issues several hundred commands to the ship's systems. The ship is equipped with unique scientific equipment and has sophisticated tracking systems and control panels. Therefore, managing a spacecraft and scientific equipment requires astronauts to have high technical culture and scientific knowledge.

There are two main requirements for the astronaut profession.

First: the astronaut must be a tester. He is obliged to monitor and test the spacecraft itself and its onboard systems in flight - this is necessary for the development of space technology. An astronaut must participate in the creation of a spacecraft at all stages, from design, engineering development to ground testing of the ship and its systems. Of course, this requires comprehensive technical knowledge and design and testing experience.

And second: the astronaut must be a researcher. He must be able to receive and transmit to Earth valuable scientific information about the surrounding outer space, atmosphere and surface of the Earth. And for this he needs extensive knowledge in various fields of science and technology, knowledge of the latest problems facing scientists and engineers.

Preparing astronauts for space flight requires a lot of work on Earth. Cosmonauts spend a lot of time in design bureaus, research institutes, laboratories, and observatories. They, together with scientists and engineers, create methods for performing experiments in space. Sometimes they participate in the creation of scientific equipment and test it on Earth. A space flight is carried out only when its testing and research program is carefully prepared. The astronaut goes on a flight fully prepared to carry out a complex program of scientific research and experiments.

There is also no doubt that an astronaut must have impeccable health and high moral and volitional qualities, since both preparation for a flight on Earth and the space flight itself require the exertion of all his physical and moral strength.

During a flight, an astronaut tests both himself and his body. Without engineering experience, without scientific knowledge, without comprehensive physical, psychological and moral preparation, without high culture, it is impossible to make a space flight.

Today, the astronaut profession is perhaps the youngest and rarest, but the future belongs to it. The founder of this profession, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, is our contemporary. His feat will forever remain in the affairs and memory of the people of planet Earth. And those paths that are already being laid and will be laid in the vastness of the Universe will become a monument to this brave and kind Man - the son of the blue planet. The ideals of communism led him on that first flight, they led him to serve Humanity. He said: “The main strength in a person is the strength of spirit, the Party feeds us with it...”

Over the first decade, space technology has advanced much further than the most prominent scientists and specialists from around the world expected. At the beginning of the second decade, man set foot on the moon. Undoubtedly, the next decade will be marked by new achievements by mankind in exploring the Universe for the benefit of our Earth. The development of astronautics requires constant and long-term human work in space, requires the solution of applied problems, and this, in turn, contributes to the development of various sectors of the national economy for the benefit of people.

It is clear that no state alone will be able to implement all the important projects for humanity to understand and transform the worlds around us. It is necessary to organize and unite the efforts and resources of mankind, to achieve a new level of international relations and connections. Only by solving these problems will modern society be able to fulfill the behest of K. E. Tsiolkovsky, will be able to “prepare a great future for humanity and connect it with the conquest of space.”

It would be wrong to think that simply pouring money into the development of medicine, into the creation of new high-yielding GM plants and fast-growing GM animals will lead to significant progress in these industries. And it would be wrong to think that stopping funding for the space industry will not lead to negative consequences in the future.

The problem of hunger needs to be addressed on many fronts, but first of all, changes in laws are needed. For example, developed countries are buying up cheap land in developing countries in Africa, thereby oppressing the local population. It is necessary to prevent the export of food from poor countries. And, for example, we need to somehow combat myths about the dangers of GMOs and prevent the emergence of laws restricting the use of genetic technologies. (By the way, genetic technologies also help with diseases.)

As for medicine, the development of most of the necessary technologies is paid for from the wallets of the patients themselves: health is usually spent first. And if everyone is treated for free, then the money that is now going to space (they are not so “colossal”) will not even be close to enough.

The development of space-related technologies is necessary for many reasons. For example, we need to somehow solve the problem with the increasing amount of space debris, and at the present stage this is a practically unsolvable problem. You need to have a good asteroid threat warning system. We need to search for planets suitable for colonization, since over the next billion years, due to the evolution of our star, the Goldilocks zone will be shifted and life on Earth will die, or we need to learn to control the climate and remove excess solar energy. And it is also necessary to extract resources in space. In addition, many technologies and new knowledge obtained in contact with this vast empty space can help create new technologies and knowledge in other industries, including vital ones.

Space can not only benefit science, but also culture, promoting people's daydreaming and helping to forget about primordial earthly strife.

In 1970, Zambian nun Sister Maria Jukunda wrote a letter to Ernst Stuhlinger, then deputy director for science at NASA's Space Flight Center, in response to his ongoing research into manned missions to Mars. In particular, she asked how he could propose spending billions of dollars on such a project at a time when so many children on Earth are starving.

Stuhlinger soon sent the following letter of explanation to Sister Jucunda, along with a copy of the iconic 1968 Earthrise photograph taken by astronaut William Anders from the Moon. His thoughtful response was subsequently published by NASA under the title "Why Explore Space?"

Dear Sister Maria Jukunda,

Your letter was among the many that come to me every day, but it touched me much more deeply than others, since it came from a man of deep thought and compassion. I will try to answer your question as best as I can.

First, however, I would like to express my deepest admiration for you and those many brave sisters for dedicating your lives to the noblest purpose: helping those in need.

In your letter you asked how I could propose spending billions of dollars on a trip to Mars at a time when many children on Earth are dying of starvation. I know you don't expect an answer like, "Oh, I didn't know there were children dying of starvation, but from now on I will refrain from any space exploration until humanity solves this problem!" In fact, I knew about starving children long before I knew that travel to the planet Mars was technically possible. However, I believe, like many of my friends, that traveling to the Moon and ultimately to Mars and other planets is a risky endeavor that we must undertake, and I even believe that this project will ultimately , will contribute to solving greater problems we face here on Earth than many of the other potential aid projects that have been discussed and discussed year after year, and which have been very slow to produce tangible results.

Before attempting to describe in more detail how our space program contributes to solving our earthly problems, I would like to briefly tell a supposedly true story that may help support my argument. About 400 years ago, in a small town in Germany, there lived a count. He was one of the generous earls and gave much of his income to the poor of his city. This was highly valued because poverty was rampant in the Middle Ages and frequent plagues periodically devastated the country. One day the count met a strange man. He had a workshop and a small laboratory in his house, and he worked tirelessly during the day to afford a few hours of laboratory work every evening. He ground small lenses from pieces of glass, mounted the lenses in tubes, and used these devices to look at very small objects. The Count was especially fascinated by tiny creatures that could be observed with great magnification, and which he had never seen. He invited this man to move his laboratory to the castle and from now on devote all his time to the development and improvement of his optical devices.

However, the townspeople became angry when they realized that, in their opinion, the count was spending his money aimlessly. “We are suffering from this plague,” they said, “while he pays this man for a useless hobby!” But the count firmly stood his ground. “I’ll give you as much as I can afford,” he said, “but I’ll also support this man and his work because I know something will come of it someday!”

Indeed, something very good came out of this work, as well as from similar work done by other scientists in other places: the microscope. It is known that the microscope, more than any other invention, has contributed to the progress of medicine, and that the eradication of plague and other infectious diseases in most parts of the world is largely the result of research made possible by the microscope. The Count, by giving some of his money to research and discovery, did much more to alleviate human suffering than he could have done by spending it all on a plague-ridden society.

The situation we face today is similar in many ways. The President of the United States spends approximately $200 billion in his annual budget. This money goes to healthcare, education, social security, urban reconstruction, roads, transport, foreign aid, defense, science, agriculture and many installations inside and outside the country. About 1.6 percent of this national budget was allocated to space exploration this year. The space program includes Project Apollo and many other smaller projects in space physics, space astronomy, space biology, planetary projects, Earth resources projects and space technology. To make these space program expenses possible, the average American taxpayer with an annual income of $10,000 pays about $30 in taxes on space. The rest of his income, $9,970, is left for his needs, vacations, savings, taxes and all other expenses.

You're probably asking now, "Why don't you take $5 or $3 or $1 out of the $30 space dollars the average American taxpayer pays and send those dollars to hungry children?" To answer this question, I must briefly explain how the economy of this country works. The situation is very similar to other countries. The government consists of several departments (Interior, Justice, Health, Education and Welfare, Transportation, Defense, etc.) and bureaus (National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, etc.). They all prepare their annual budgets according to their objectives, and each must protect their budgets from the extreme scrutiny of congressional committees and intense pressure from the Office of the Budget and the President. When these funds are finally approved by Congress, they can only be spent on certain items of expenditure that are identified and approved in the budget.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration budget, of course, can only contain those items of expenditure that are directly related to aeronautics and space. If a budget has not been approved by Congress, then the funds proposed for it will not be available for anything else, they are simply not charged to the taxpayer if no other budget has received approval for a particular increase, which then eats up funds not spent on space. As you can see from this brief discourse, support for starving children, or rather support in addition to the United States already contributing to this very worthy cause in the form of foreign economic assistance, can only be obtained if there is a request from the appropriate department to include a budget line specifically for this purpose and if the item is then approved by Congress.

You may ask whether I would personally support such a move on the part of our government. My answer is a resounding yes. In fact, I wouldn't mind at all if my annual taxes were raised a few dollars to go towards feeding hungry children, wherever they live.

I know all my friends feel the same way. However, we could not put such a program into practice simply by refraining from plans to travel to Mars. On the contrary, I even believe that by working for the space program, I can make a certain contribution to alleviating and ultimately solving such a serious problem as poverty and hunger on Earth. There are two main issues in the problem of hunger: food production and food distribution. Food processing, agriculture, cattle ranching, ocean fishing and other large-scale operations are efficient in some parts of the world, but fall dramatically short in efficiency in many others. For example, large tracts of land can be put to much more productive use by employing effective methods of watershed management, fertilizer use, weather forecasting, fertility assessment, plantation programming, field selection, crop timing, plant research, and crop planning.

The best means to improve all these functions is undoubtedly an artificial Earth satellite. By circling the globe at high altitude, it can scan wide areas of the earth in a short time, it can observe and measure a wide variety of factors indicating the status and condition of crops, soil, drought, rain, snow, etc., and it can transmit this information to ground stations for proper use. It has been estimated that even a modest system of Earth satellites equipped with sensors with data on Earth's resources, working as part of a program for worldwide agricultural improvement, would increase annual harvests by the equivalent of many billions of dollars.

Distributing food to those in need is a completely different matter. The question is not so much about the volume of supplies, but about international cooperation. The ruler of a small nation may feel very uneasy at the prospect of large quantities of aid being supplied to his country by a large nation, simply because he fears that the influence and power of foreign powers may be imported with the supply of food. I fear that effective famine relief will not come until the borders between countries become less contentious than they are now. I don't believe that spaceflight will accomplish this miracle overnight. However, the space program is certainly one of the most promising and powerful sources working in this direction.

Let me just remind you of the final near-tragedy of Apollo 13. When the time came for the astronauts to make their final re-entry into the atmosphere, the Soviet Union stopped all Russian radio transmissions in the frequency ranges used by the Apollo project in order to avoid possible interference, and the Russian ships were stationed in the waters of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans in case of need for emergency rescue operations. If a capsule with astronauts had landed next to Russian ships, the Russians would undoubtedly have given as much attention and efforts to save them as if Russian cosmonauts had returned from space travel. If the Russian astronauts ever found themselves in a similar emergency situation, the Americans would do the same without any doubt.

Increased food production through exploration and assessment from orbit, and better food distribution through improved international relations, are just two examples of how profoundly the space program will impact life on earth. I would like to give two other examples: stimulating technological development and generating scientific knowledge.

The demands for high precision and reliability that must be placed on the components of a spacecraft traveling to the Moon are unprecedented in the history of technology. Developing systems that meet these high demands has provided us with a unique opportunity to discover new materials and methods, invent better technical systems, manufacturing procedures, increase tool life, and even discover new laws of nature.

All this newly acquired technical knowledge is also available for application in earthly technology. Every year, about a thousand technical innovations are generated in the space program, and they are used in our earthly technology, thanks to them, improvements in household and agricultural equipment, sewing machines and radios, ships and airplanes, weather forecasting, communications, medical instruments, utensils and tools for everyday use. life. You may be wondering why we must first develop life support systems for our moon-going astronauts before we can create remote sensor systems for heart patients. The answer is simple: significant progress in solving technical problems is often made not by a direct approach, but by first setting a lofty goal, which provides a strong motivation for innovative work, which in turn excites the imagination and motivates people to make the greatest effort, and which acts as a catalyst, including for a chain of other reactions.

Space flights, without any doubt, play exactly this role. A trip to Mars, of course, is not a direct source of food for the hungry. However, it will lead to the discovery of so many new technologies and opportunities that the side effects of this project alone will be many times greater than the cost of its implementation.

In addition to the need for new technologies, there is a constant need for new basic knowledge in the sciences if we are to improve the human condition on Earth. We need more knowledge in physics and chemistry, biology and physiology, and especially in medicine, to cope with all these problems that threaten human life: hunger, disease, food and water contamination, environmental pollution.

We need more young men and women choosing careers in science, and we need to support talented scientists who aspire to do fruitful research work. Complex research problems must be accessible and sufficient support for research projects must be provided. Again, the space program, with its excellent opportunities for engaging in truly magnificent scientific research on satellites and planets, physics and astronomy, biology and medicine, is an almost ideal catalyst that produces a reaction between motivation for scientific work and the opportunity to observe fascinating natural phenomena, and material support necessary to carry out research work.

Of all the activities that are directed, controlled and financed by the American government, the space program is by far the most visible and perhaps the most discussed, although it consumes only 1.6 percent of the total government budget, and 3 thousandths (less than one-third 1 percent) of the gross national product. As a stimulator and catalyst for the development of new technologies, as well as for research in the basic sciences, it is unparalleled. In this regard, we can even say that the space program is taking over a function that for three or four thousand years was the sad prerogative of wars.