Science: Take Off That Space Suit

Loose talk about space travel has gone pretty far; it may be a bit early to think of orbiting Air Force generals and rocket company executives circling the moon. To bring some sense to such flights of fancy, President Lee DuBridge of Caltech last week gave the Western Space Age Conference in Los Angeles a tranquilizing dose of anti-poppycock.

Physicist DuBridge is all for unmanned satellites to study the earth and nearby space, and perhaps to orbit the moon. "A scientist," he said, "cannot help but be excited by this prospect. It opens up wholly new areas of exploration. A whole book could be written about what the astronomers would like to do with a telescope above the atmosphere.''

Is It Worth It? About satellites that carry human beings Dr. DuBridge is dubious. "For most scientific explorations in space," he said, "the presence of man involves quite unwarranted complications and expense not justified by what he can contribute to the success of the venture . . . . Instruments are content to coast around in space unused and unattended for years, and to come back to earth, if at all, in a fiery cataclysm. But not a man. He wants to get back to earth not only unburnt but essentially unjarred. Now I assure you this is not easy, and we are a long way from having the faintest idea of how to do it in any practical way."

Easy or not, "human beings are going to insist, some day, on taking journeys out into space. The spirit of human adventure cannot be suppressed, no matter what it costs . . . But when we talk about landing a man on the moon or Mars or some other planet and then getting him off again and back home safely, we are talking about a new order of magnitude of difficulty and cost . . . Nothing impossible about it, you understand. It will just take a lot of money and a long time. Whether it is worth it or not depends on our concept of the values to be achieved."

What are these values? "Clearly, a man landing on the moon and coming back could bring back valuable scientific information, [but] most responsible scientists would feel that we could collect plenty of scientific data about the moon during the next few years by cheaper methods.

"What then about the military value of space travel? Satellites . . . will make fine reconnaissance vehicles . . . and will be good for weather observations . . . That, as far as I can see, is about the end of the story on the military value of earth satellites. You can't drop a bomb from a satellite; it just won't drop, and to project a bomb to earth is about as difficult as getting our human being back to earth . . . It's no good getting it on the wrong side of the earth."