Pathfinders – The ‘doged’ pursuit of knowledge

A funny thing about touted scientific breakthroughs is that, just like politicians’ promises, they make a lot of noise at first, but then are apt to quietly fizzle out later when nobody’s looking. So it may have been for the strangely headline-grabbing announcement back in March that a new ‘Dark Energy experiment’ was challenging Einstein’s theory of the universe. Wait, what, they’ve disproved Einstein, you gasp? But no, it’s not quite that big an earthquake. Stargazers at the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona’s Kitt Peak National Observatory had found a ‘blip’ in the cosmological measurements that suggested that the mysterious dark energy force supposedly driving the expansion of the universe might have slightly weakened over time. Though the key phrase is ‘might have’, this immediately got everyone terribly excited at the prospect of ‘new physics’ and the possible need to rewrite the cosmological standard model. Years of funded research and potential Nobel prizes glistered like the starry firmament, but cosmologists were quick to point out that this was in no way a certain result and would require vital independent confirmation from other sources, notably Europe’s Euclid space telescope and NASA’s forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman space telescope (tinyurl.com/4sv65khx).

So it may be something and it may be nothing, which is fair enough. But then why did it make such huge headlines, as if it was a genuine discovery? Well, let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment and pretend that we are jaded and cynical observers of capitalism, and ask ourselves what other factors might be at play here. Let’s in particular imagine the following entirely fictitious bit of dialogue: “Trump’s threatening to cut the NASA budget in half!” “Oh shit, we need to big up a breakthrough, pronto!”

Yup, when suddenly you can’t pay your mortgage or bills moments after having a safe and respectable long-term government-funded science career at the National Institutes of Health (proposed to be cut by 37 percent), the National Science Foundation (50+ percent), the Department of Energy (14 percent), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (24 percent), the US Geological Survey (33+ percent), the Department of Agriculture (18 percent), the Environmental Protection Agency (46 percent), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (39 percent), the Forest Service (62 percent), or the innocuous National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services – funding anthropology and archaeology – and the Marine Mammal Commission – saving the whales – (all 100 percent), you know you’ve been ‘Doged’. And few agencies are being hit harder than NASA, with an eye-watering 53 percent cut (tinyurl.com/3crbp648). Obviously all its Earth science climate projects will be the first to go, as the Drill Baby is not interested in those. But one of the other projects which might also bite the dust is the aforementioned Nancy Grace Roman space telescope, now coincidentally being cited as vital for confirming the Einstein-busting dark energy result (tinyurl.com/hejv2ztr).

It’s not that Trump is anti-science per se. He’s all for science as long as it makes him look good. So he was redneck-hot for the Artemis programme to plant NASA astronauts in MAGA hats back on the moon, especially if they could do it before the Chinese got there. President Bush originally also had a moon programme, called Constellation, that Obama subsequently cancelled, and Trump brought back as Artemis. But here, observers say, NASA was its own worst enemy, by being too institutionalised and cavalier about cost overruns, and using legacy suppliers like Boeing, whose own Starliner vehicle turned out to be an embarrassment (Pathfinders, October 2024). Asked to build a new rocket that could get humans to the moon, NASA simply came up with an adaptation of the previous Constellation-era Ares V rocket, rebranded as the Space Launch System (SLS). Despite this now being the era of cheap and reusable rockets, the SLS is a disappointing and hugely expensive replica of the old single-use Saturn V model. The US is now planning to ‘retire’ the SLS, possibly before it’s even launched, instead looking to private capital in the form of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is offering to do the same job for around one fortieth of the SLS cost ($100m versus $4bn).

NASA is more than an agency, it’s an icon, with an almost reverential status in US history for putting Neil Armstrong on the moon. Savaging its funding must seem to many like burning your own sacred temple to spite the priests. But it’s also a monument from another age, when private capitalists were not nearly as rich as they are today, and only governments had the resources to fund space programmes. Now, tech bros like Bezos and Musk are doing their own space programmes, and doing them in some ways better than NASA. This is incidentally rather awkward to explain for those people who think ‘socialism’ is the state ownership of industries and that this is somehow an improvement on private capitalism. It’s not. State and private capitalism are as bad as each other, and both exploit workers and give them no real say.

As far as capitalist science is concerned, the goal is generally profit not the pursuit of knowledge. The rich get to decide what it pursues, either directly through their own purse, or indirectly through their complicit governments. Obama’s 2015 Space Act, cravenly endorsed by 43 countries, is widely seen as the new ‘enclosures’ for legalising space mining for profit (tinyurl.com/3va6mkdf). But once workers recognise their true common interest and abolish capitalism, what would happen to these capitalist-era plans to go to the Moon, or Mars? They’ll probably slide right down the global To Do list, below more pressing priorities like sustainable universal nutrition, health and housing, but possibly not off it entirely. The final frontier is always going to fascinate humans. The key difference is, when a socialist world looks up at the night sky, it will look with eyes of wonder, and not with an eye to plunder.

PJS


Next article: Letter – What would a socialist councillor do? ⮞

Leave a Reply