OBSERVATION OF THE DAY. Tom (The Right Stuff) Wolfe.

NASA’s annual budget sank like a stone from $5 billion in the mid-1960s to $3 billion in the mid-1970s. It was at this point that NASA’s lack of a philosopher corps became a real problem. The fact was, NASA had only one philosopher, Wernher von Braun. Toward the end of his life, von Braun knew he was dying of cancer and became very contemplative. I happened to hear him speak at a dinner in his honor in San Francisco. He raised the question of what the space program was really all about.

It’s been a long time, but I remember him saying something like this: Here on Earth we live on a planet that is in orbit around the Sun. The Sun itself is a star that is on fire and will someday burn up, leaving our solar system uninhabitable. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of.

Writers intuit this, even if the politicians and accountants don't. Consider Star Trek: First Contact, in which the inventor of a warp drive has to demonstrate it when the Vulcans are in the neighborhood. Or consider Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sentinel," perhaps the first serious speculation about life in other solar systems. The Sentinel is left on the Moon, where it can be dug up only by a civilization advanced enough to leave a Class M planet and committed enough to space exploration to bring something more than an entrenching tool to gather Moon rocks. (If that sounds like something from 2001: A Space Odyssey, there's good reason.)