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Negative Article: “Private Companies Won't Take the Lead in Space Exploration”
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- ***Affirmative Articles***
- Affirmative Article: “Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science”
- Affirmative Article: “The Soft Power Fallacy”
- Affirmative Article: “Changing Americas International Image”
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Negative Article: “Private Companies Won't Take the Lead in Space Exploration”By Anthony Ha, writer at TechCrunch, citing Neil deGrasse Tyson, Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and astrophysics research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. Published March 8, 2014. Available at http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/08/neil-degrasse-tyson-sxsw/ Famed scientist and science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson talked about the importance of space exploration today during his keynote at South by Southwest Interactive. Despite advances by private companies, particularly SpaceX, he said they won’t be the ones making the biggest breakthroughs. Tyson admitted that for him, the appeal of space travel is the simple fact that it’s “a frontier.” However, there are more practical reasons to go into space. For one thing, we need to be able to respond if we find out that an asteroid is headed for Earth. “You know the dinosuars would have if they could have,” Tyson said. He joked that failing to pursue a space program when we have the scientific and technological capability would make us “the laughing stock” of other intelligent species: “They’d have human bones on display in their museum. ‘Here they are, not building a spaceship.'” He also suggested that space travel is tied to other forms of significant innovation like transportation, energy, and health — which he contrasted with people “who innovate because you want to make a buck” and are trying to figure out “the next app.” Tyson described space travel as “a long-term investment”: “It’s an investment that private enterprise cannot lead.” He recalled the excitement around SpaceX’s delivery of cargo the International Space Station, which sparked discussion about whether private companies would replace government as the main engine behind space travel. Tyson’s response? “They brought cargo to the space station! NASA’s been doing that for 30 years!” The problem, he said, is that it’s hard to predict the risk and return on investment on “doing anything big and expensive first.” He noted that the first Europeans to come to America were not the Dutch East India Company, but Christopher Columbus and his crew, whose expedition was paid for by Spain. After the initial exploration, there will be opportunities for private companies. “The first trillionaire in the world is going to be the person who first mines the asteroid belt,” Tyson said. ***Affirmative Articles***Affirmative Article: “Review of Space Plans Led to Changes at NASA”By James Dean, reporter at Florida Today. Published October 11, 2014. Available at http://www.floridatoday.com/story/tech/science/space/2014/10/11/panels-review-space-plans-led-changes-nasa-ksc/17104651/ Five years after a presidential review panel found it was on an "unsustainable trajectory," NASA's human spaceflight program continues to suffer from a mismatch between its budget and goals, the panel's chairman says. "The funding still doesn't match the missions," said Norman Augustine, the former Lockheed Martin CEO who headed the Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee, in a recent interview. "We've been there before, we know how that movie ends. I just hope we find a way to avoid that." The so-called Augustine Committee's October 2009 report led to policy shifts — including the cancellation of a major exploration program — that changed Kennedy Space Center's future dramatically in some ways and less so in others, leaving reasons for both optimism and concern today. On the bright side, KSC is leading NASA's push to help companies develop commercial rockets and spacecraft that could resume launches of astronauts from the Space Coast to the International Space Station by 2017. Gloomier in outlook: a revamped exploration program won't launch a crew beyond low Earth orbit before 2021, and then anticipates infrequent launches to unspecified destinations because of limited funding — while claiming to be on a path to Mars in the 2030s. NASA and Obama administration officials say the Augustine review prompted the agency to pursue new ways of doing business that have helped put human spaceflight on more sustainable footing. "In just the last five years, we've made historic progress — metal is being bent, new rockets and capsules are being launched from U.S. soil, another rover is on Mars, private investments are creating jobs, and a new American industry is taking off," said Phil Larson, senior adviser for space and innovation in the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy. But for all the program changes of the last five years, the administration and Congress have not delivered more money. That despite the 10-member review panel's core finding that no exploration into deep space was viable without upping NASA's budget by $3 billion. The agency's budget is down slightly since 2009, to $17.6 billion, and projected to stay flat for years to come. "It's disappointing where we are on our human spaceflight program," said Leroy Chiao, one of two former astronauts who served on the committee along with Sally Ride, who died in 2012. "We asked the administration, please don't do what so many administrations do, which is say we want to do it all and then underfund it, which is exactly what happened." Affirmative Article: “Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science”By William Broad, science journalist and senior writer at The New York Times. Published March 15, 2014 in the New York Times. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/science/billionaires-with-big-ideas-are-privatizing-american-science.html American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise. In Washington, budget cuts have left the nation’s research complex reeling. Labs are closing. Scientists are being laid off. Projects are being put on the shelf, especially in the risky, freewheeling realm of basic research. Yet from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, science philanthropy is hot, as many of the richest Americans seek to reinvent themselves as patrons of social progress through science research. The result is a new calculus of influence and priorities that the scientific community views with a mix of gratitude and trepidation. “For better or worse,” said Steven A. Edwards, a policy analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “the practice of science in the 21st century is becoming shaped less by national priorities or by peer-review groups and more by the particular preferences of individuals with huge amounts of money.” They have mounted a private war on disease, with new protocols that break down walls between academia and industry to turn basic discoveries into effective treatments. They have rekindled traditions of scientific exploration by financing hunts for dinosaur bones and giant sea creatures. They are even beginning to challenge Washington in the costly game of big science, with innovative ships, undersea craft and giant telescopes — as well as the first private mission to deep space. The new philanthropists represent the breadth of American business, people like Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor (and founder of the media company that bears his name), James Simons (hedge funds) and David H. Koch (oil and chemicals), among hundreds of wealthy donors. Especially prominent, though, are some of the boldest-face names of the tech world, among them Bill Gates (Microsoft), Eric E. Schmidt (Google) and Lawrence J. Ellison (Oracle). This is philanthropy in the age of the new economy — financed with its outsize riches, practiced according to its individualistic, entrepreneurial creed. The donors are impatient with the deliberate, and often politicized, pace of public science, they say, and willing to take risks that government cannot or simply will not consider. Yet that personal setting of priorities is precisely what troubles some in the science establishment. Many of the patrons, they say, are ignoring basic research — the kind that investigates the riddles of nature and has produced centuries of breakthroughs, even whole industries — for a jumble of popular, feel-good fields like environmental studies and space exploration. Affirmative Article: “The Soft Power Fallacy”By Abe Greenwald, senior editor of Commentary magazine. Published July 1, 2010. Available at http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-soft-power-fallacy/ The supposed advantage of the soft-power approach lies in Nye’s contention that “the great powers of today are less able to use their traditional power resources to achieve their purposes than in the past.” For great powers, the use of force has simply become too costly. Additionally, the world has seen—or had seen, when Nye was writing in 1990—a “diffusion of power” due to economic interdependence, transnational actors, increased nationalism in weak states, widespread technology, and “changing political issues.” For example, the Japanese of the 1980s, who loomed large in Nye’s original calculation about the world power nexus, chose not to build up their military force because “the political cost both at home and in the reaction of other countries would be considerable. Militarization might then reduce rather than increase Japan’s ability to achieve its ends.” This was, for Nye, a model to be taken seriously. Twenty years later, in his national-security strategy, Obama warns, “When we overuse our military might, or fail to invest in or deploy complementary tools, or act without partners, then our military is overstretched, Americans bear a greater burden, and our leadership around the world is too narrowly identified with military force.” The repeated references to a rising Japan are but one of many tip-offs that Nye’s book amounted to a piece of earnest, post–Cold War wishful thinking, a means by which to redeem the much-discussed “peace dividend” bequeathed to America by the Soviet collapse through the ramping down of American military commitments. Like Francis Fukuyama’s essay “The End of History,” soft-power theory was a creative and appealing attempt to make sense of America’s global purpose. Unlike Fukuyama’s theory, however, which the new global order seemed to support for nearly a decade, Nye’s was basically refuted by world events in its very first year. In the summer of 1990, a massive contingent of Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait and effectively annexed it as a province of Iraq. Although months earlier Nye had asserted that “geography, population, and raw materials are becoming somewhat less important,” the fact is that Saddam invaded Kuwait because of its geographic proximity, insubstantial military, and plentiful oil reserves. Despite Nye’s claim that “the definition of power is losing its emphasis on military force,” months of concerted international pressure, including the passage of a UN resolution, failed to persuade Saddam to withdraw. In the end, only overwhelming American military power succeeded in liberating Kuwait. The American show of force also succeeded in establishing the U.S. as the single, unrivaled post–Cold War superpower. Following the First Gulf War, the 1990s saw brutal acts of aggression in the Balkans: the Bosnian War in 1992 and the Kosovo conflicts beginning in 1998. These raged on despite international negotiations and were quelled only after America took the lead in military actions. It is also worth noting that attempts to internationalize these efforts made them more costly in time, effectiveness, and manpower than if the U.S. had acted unilaterally. Additionally, the 1990s left little mystery as to how cataclysmic events unfold when the U.S. declines to apply traditional tools of power overseas. In April 1994, Hutu rebels began the indiscriminate killing of Tutsis in Rwanda. As the violence escalated, the United Nations’s peacekeeping forces stood down so as not to violate a UN mandate prohibiting intervention in a country’s internal politics. Washington followed suit, refusing even to consider deploying forces to East-Central Africa. By the time the killing was done, in July of the same year, Hutus had slaughtered between half a million and 1 million Tutsis. And in the 1990s, Japan’s economy went into its long stall, making the Japanese model of a scaled down military seem rather less relevant. All this is to say that during the presidency of Bill Clinton, Nye’s “intangible forms of power” proved to hold little sway in matters of statecraft, while modes of traditional power remained as critical as ever in coercing other nations and affirming America’s role as chief protector of the global order. Affirmative Article: “Changing America's International Image”By Michel Scholer, undergraduate studying Politics with International Studies at the University of Exeter, writing for The Foreign Report. Published January 2, 2014. Available at http://www.theforeignreport.com/2014/01/02/bully-friend-changing-americas-international-image/ From his first days in office, Obama has sought a rapprochement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, to such an extent that some governors, such as Rick Perry, have accused him of betraying Israel. In November, after weeks of secret talks, he has struck a major symbolic coup by making a phone call to the Iranian president Rouhani. In 2009, during a landmark speech in Cairo, he boldly declared to ‘seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect’. However, the results of the yearly Pew Research Global Attitudes Project paint a somewhat pessimistic picture. The five countries surveyed that have the least favourable opinion of the United States are all Muslim countries from the Middle East. Despite the administration’s conciliatory rhetoric, its actions speak a different language and give an easy explanation for the dislike, and even hatred, the United States encounters in these countries. For example, only 11% of Pakistanis see the United States in favourable terms. Regularly, Pakistanis are killed by U.S. drone strikes. The most recent drone strike happened only a week ago, on 26th December, and hit a compound in a village bordering Afghanistan. It is not a surprise that a population that is attacked weekly by a foreign military, in the absence of an official state of war, dislikes this country. Indeed, the American drone policy is a very unpopular one all around the world. In only three of the countries surveyed in the Pew project does a majority of the population approve of the U.S. drone policy. Unsurprisingly, two of them are Israel and the United States itself. In Egypt, 84% held unfavourable views of the United States, and this too may be down to the US’s recent foreign policy. Many Egyptians were disappointed by America’s inaction during the struggles against Hosni Mubarak, as well as the lack of condemnation of the coup d’état staged by the Egyptian military. There is, however, an important distinction to make. What is absent from all the explanations given above, are ideological or religious differences. While the bottom five countries with the least favourable view of the United States are all Muslim, the decisive factor is that they are all from the Middle East. Muslim countries in other regions of the world view the United States in much more positive terms. It is American policy in the Middle East that frustrates the populations from Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Palestine, and Jordan, not an apparent hatred of American values and civilization. For example, majorities in Senegal (81%), Indonesia (61%) and Malaysia (55%) have a favourable view of the United States. These countries are all overwhelmingly Muslim, and yet the opinions are more favourable than some European countries. Further evidence from the Pew project supports this conclusion: that it is American policies that make other populations dislike the United States and not any innate hatred of American values. The revelations by former NSA-contractor Edward Snowden of the worldwide mass surveillance organized by the American national security apparatus have severely damaged American reputation throughout the world. For example, in Germany (53%) and Argentina (41%), the spying on Chancellor Merkel, and President Kirchner respectively, seems to have had a major detrimental effect upon American popularity. It suggests that the United States’ unpopularity stems from its policies and actions rather than the existing belief that other populations and/or religions have an intrinsic hatred of American civilization. On a more positive note, then, it is crucial to note that this finding implies that declining American popularity is not inevitable and that a change in American foreign policy, away from unilateralism, military muscle-flexing and secret mass surveillance, towards multilateralism, soft power and transparency will result in a much-improved international standing of the United States. It is unsurprising that a country behaving in such a way is unpopular; nobody likes the bully in the playground. In this sense, it is also important to register that the Pew project also found that other countries see American democracy, ideas and customs in much more favourable terms than its drone strike policy. ***Glossary***GlossarySpace Launch System and Orion Spacecraft These are two of the most important current NASA projects. The Space Launch System is designed to be the most powerful rocket in history, with the capacity to launch spacecraft in future missions on asteriods or to Mars. The Orion spacecraft is the vehicle that will actually transport future astronauts on these misions. Soft power and hard power These refer to two theories about how American can or should exercise power in foreign policy. “Hard power” refers to military resources and coercive threats: air strikes against ISIS is an example of a hard power policy. “Soft power” refers to cooperation and diplomacy that attempts to solve these same problems: for example, many countries might cooperate to interrupt funding networks for terrorist organizations. The disadvantage argues that NASA funding can increase these cooperative resources, which will make soft power more effective. Importantly, soft power and hard power aren't necessarily alternatives: both can be used at the same time to achieve foreign policy objectives. One open question is whether addressing a single policy issue, such as NASA funding, significantly affects soft power. America's ability to use soft power is largely determined by how other countries and their populations view U.S. policy. Given that many U.S. policies are unpopular – NSA surveillence and Guantanamo Bay, for instance – there is debate over whether it would be necessary to change all of these policies in order for soft power to work effectively. Privatization Many governments around the world are decreasing spending, at the same time as wealthy business executives increase their spending in many of these same areas. American education, for instance, is increasingly funded by private companies and individuals rather than by the government. These same patterns potentially apply to NASA funding: it's possible that, in the future, space exploration will be supported by private investment rather than public funding. 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