Here’s my book review of The Gravity Well: America’s Next Greatest Mission by Steven Sanford.

Steven Sanford was trained as a research engineer and spent almost three decades as a NASA employee when he left the agency recently to work for a contract engineering firm. He was Director for Space Technology and Exploration at NASA’s Langley Research Center. The gravity well refers to the huge physical effort required to overcome the Earth’s pole and climb into space. It is the first and most significant challenge of space travel. Having attained escape velocity from our planet and venturing far enough up and out, a space vehicle will have the option to park in one of several fixed locations called Lagrangian points. At these distances, gravitational forces are balanced, such that location can be maintained indefinitely, with no further expenditure of energy.

This is the logical place to build space stations. The Gravity Well, the book, is in effect Sanford’s heartfelt, elaborately reasoned letter to US taxpayers and members of Congress. The single most beneficial thing we can do to stimulate the economy and reset national priorities would be to augment the relatively modest NASA budget by a third.

The current authorization is about $19 billion. Sanford argues persuasively for $30 billion.

He doesn’t even propose we take the hit all at once. His proposal is for Congress to increase that budget by $1.2 billion per year for 8 years. His proposal is precise, achievable, and modest. Its diminutive fiscal size becomes apparent when you compare it with the voracious requirements of the Department of Defense, which exceeds a half-trillion dollars per year. And that’s not counting the supplemental allocations for various wars.

Sanford’s argument is also straightforward: No single expenditure by the federal government holds the prospect of producing such generous returns.

For example, he points out, “A single asteroid, no wider than your living room, can contain $10 billion worth of gold, along with platinum, tungsten, and the rare-earth metals we desperately need here where supplies are running low.”

And you don’t even have to conquer a third-world nation or fight a war with some other superpower to grab this stuff. (That’s my inference, not his explicit point.) Your tightfisted representative might well ask, “Why can’t private industry do this?” Well, it can and it will. But the history of all major technological advances is marked by government taking the early steps reducing risk and forging a path of entry for private investment. Computers, micro electronics, the Internet, and the telecom backbone all have their origins in broadly funded government initiatives bold. Brash and ambitious as are Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, none would have dared invest in advanced rocketry if the basic engineering were not already mature.

Sanford cites a little-known example that aviation itself might have taken much longer to evolve – if at the end of World War I the US Postal Service hadn’t gambled the then-colossal sum of $5 million to fund transcontinental airmail service.

Let’s start by making every member of Congress aware of the gravity Well. Let’s also make it required reading in high school – and our manifesto for a grassroots political movement. Let’s inspire America to a new vision of world leadership that emphasizes international cooperation for mutual benefit. And dare we hope for not just survival but a grander destiny.

However, I’m not predicting immediate success. I hope I’m wrong. But Sanford’s proposal seemed to well reasoned and too eminently logical to have any effect on public policy in the near term. If national pride drove the swelling of the defense establishment. reallocating money to space would be easy. But it’s widespread fear that motivates the building of redundant piles of weaponry. Congress today is full of unscrupulous, self-interested politicians who, despite their patrician educations, find that sneering at science and leveraging the public’s fears get them votes.

Can we seriously believe that an Ivy-League trained-lawyer has so little understanding of science as to scoff at evolution, climatology, and the obvious need for population control? For Sanford’s plan to work, the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson and Laura Sinclair (that’s the January 2017 Woman Physicist of the Month) need to run for office.

And sooner rather than later, we need a better educated electorate that respects learning more than celebrity.