New Economy; Even as it gazes toward the stars, the space program has broad benefits for those rooted to Earth.
By Amy Harmon
Published: February 10, 2003
SINCE the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia nine days ago, squads of men and women have fanned out across eastern Texas toting state-of-the-art global positioning devices to mark the precise location of fallen tiles, mechanical parts and assorted debris. The devices make their calculations by triangulating with satellites that carry atomic clocks and orbit the Earth at an altitude of 12,000 miles.
Besides performing a task that could help piece together the cause of the calamity, the searchers with their sophisticated global positioning equipment evoke an almost poignant contrast between the creaky 1970's-era space technology that lies scattered across the Southwest and the decidedly snazzy 21st-century commercial technology that is the space program's direct descendant.
''It's really cool that the military put all those satellites up there so we can tie into this and get these positions,'' said Lee Meeks, a sales manager for Leica Geosystems' United States subsidiary in Norcross, Ga., which usually provides mapping services for counties and is supplying equipment and personnel for the recovery of shuttle debris. ''We know within one meter of where we are at any given time with our gear.''
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has come under intense criticism for failing to know much of anything with that kind of accuracy, including what happened to the Columbia. Locked into an expensive, if underfinanced, program developed three decades ago, the agency has essentially been retrofitting and reskinning old technology ever since. Now critics from many corners are calling for a reduction in spending on space, particularly for manned missions.
Meanwhile, many of the technologies that the space program has spawned have taken root and flourished in the commercial world. Among other things, the space program gave rise to the 24 orbiting satellites that make up the Global Positioning System, developed by the United States Air Force as a means of knowing exactly where military troops were at any given time.
Automakers use the system to build devices into car dashboards to enable drivers in many cities around the world to see precisely where they are on a street map displayed on the screen. Car makers also use the virtual wind-tunnel technology developed by NASA to test cars for safety and reliability. The vehicles that emerge are in many ways far more technologically sophisticated than the shuttle itself.
No one argues that potential technology spinoffs are reasons in and of themselves to pour money into NASA. But now, when space technology looks so fragile, may be the time to note some of its often overlooked legacies.
''We're benefiting now from what NASA did 20 years ago and 30 years ago,'' said Jaron Lanier, a virtual-reality pioneer who developed several technologies for NASA that migrated into commercial devices. ''If we stop funding the space program, will we still have the supply pipeline of things that are improving life, or will we be one of those places in the world that feels like the past?''
Twenty years ago, NASA gave Mr. Lanier a contract to help design the first virtual-reality glove, which is supposed to replicate the sensation of touch accurately in a computer-generated environment. Mr. Lanier is now chief scientist of the National Tele-Immersion Initiative, an effort to produce a new generation of Internet technology to provide a physically immersive experience for users. The group is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Before taking that post, Mr. Lanier parlayed his virtual-reality work into a company called VPL Research, later purchased by Sun Microsystems, which sold gloves and head-mounted displays for entertainment systems. He has also been a consultant for the development of surgical applications for the technology.
Another fruit of the space program is satellite television, made possible by geostationary communications satellites that hover 22,000 miles up, some of which were hauled part of the way into space by the shuttle before using their own propulsion systems to complete the journey. Iridium, a company that eventually went bankrupt, launched orbiting satellites only 400 miles up that still enable people to use wireless phones in places like Afghanistan without needing conventional cellular towers on the ground.
Various plastics, environmental technologies like solar cells, biomedical sensors used by emergency medical technicians, sound-enhancing circuit cards in PC's and the very idea of computer chips have roots in the space program.
''The government doesn't patent these things,'' noted Arthur Molella, director of the Smithsonian Institute's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. ''What the space program or military research programs allow you to do is nurture these technologies, and there's no question that corporate interests benefit from that. The space program itself doesn't seem to be advancing, but the technologies are taking off outside.''
The biggest technological legacy of the space program may be reliable electronics. In the early 1960's, when President John F. Kennedy declared a space race with the Russians, electronics were notoriously capricious. The needs of the Apollo program, historians of technology say, speeded up the early stages of the semiconductor industry by perhaps 10 years.
Soon after the first moon landing, though, Congress began to cut the financing for the space program.
The space program still spawns technologies that make their way into everyday life. The Mars Pathfinder mission, which featured a remote rover that took pictures and explored the planet's surface in 1997, sparked a flurry of activity in robotics.
But the space program's budget, in inflation-adjusted dollars, is a small fraction of what it was during the race to the moon, so, to a much larger extent, the agency draws on technology designed by the marketplace and adapts it to its own ends. Critics say that is a backward flow for technology -- that it is the indirect spinoffs of ambitious government projects that provide the greater public benefit. That is why they say the space program should not be curtailed, or confined to a 1970's field of vision, but should once again train its sights on the future.
''The government does things that cannot be done by the marketplace,'' said Paul Saffo, a director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. ''And one is to capture the imagination, to give us something we can aspire to. It is the single most important thing.''
Photo: Lee Meeks, a sales manager of Leica Geosystems, uses the company's global positioning device to locate debris from the Columbia shuttle in Nacogdoches, Tex. (Librado Romero/The New York Times)