NASA astronaut Russell Schweickart's career-defining moment came thanks to a camera problem.
During a spacewalk on the Apollo 9 mission,
his colleague's movie camera jammed, and Schweickart was given an order
to sit tight for 5 minutes while the team troubleshot it. He was left
to look out at the vastness of space, and Earth within it. When he came
back home, he set about trying to inspire others with that experience.
He even joined with then-Soviet cosmonauts to do so. "We're the only
people who have seen the Earth with our own eyes as a single place of
all life," Schweickart told Space.com of space travelers. "Sure enough, I
found that my fellow cosmonauts felt the same way." [Apollo 9 in Photos: NASA Tests the Spidery Lunar Module]
Much of Schweickart's energy has been directed toward planetary defense
from asteroid impacts through the nonprofit he founded, called the B612 Foundation. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Space.com: What do you think is missing from current conversations about space and space exploration? Russell Schweickart: While the pragmatic elements of
space exploration, or space utilization actually, are talked about most
frequently, the implications of humanity moving outward from the planet
to me are the most important long-term things. But they get to be a
little airy-fairy, so people generally don't talk about those kinds of
things. It's not religious but is sort of philosophical, and those
[implications] are less pragmatic, less immediate, they're not as much
fun to most people as the competition or the technology per se. But to
me it is the longer-term implications of humanity moving outward from
the planet, looking back, realizing the preciousness of the Earth as a
home of life, taking care of the planet while moving out. It's not the
cowboy mentality of, 'we've trashed this place, let's move on to the
other one.' Being born from your mother is when you start loving your
mother, it's not when you end loving your mother, [even if] you may have
partially trashed her in the process of being born. … Space development
utilizes a lot of resources — water, fuel, energy, etc., etc. — and the
pace of space development is going to depend in the long run upon the economics
of developing consumables in space and not continuing to dig up the
Earth. … There's resources galore out in space, for example, in the
asteroids, and people have talked about asteroid mining but the
economics of that has not really been studied well.
Space.com: It's interesting that you mention asteroids as a
potential resource, but are also involved in talking about those
asteroids as threats with the B612 Foundation. Schweickart:Asteroids
are multi-dimensional. … In order to protect the Earth, you've got to
know where the asteroids are and where they're headed, and we realized
at one point several years ago that when we really think about that in
the larger context, we have to develop a dynamic map of the inner solar
system. … But as soon as you think about that, that map is necessary for
all of the other aspects, whether it's exploring the asteroids for
science or as exploration venues or goals for human exploration, or for
that matter for the exploitation ultimately of space resources. That
idea of creating a dynamic map is an essential first step for all of the
different dimensions that asteroids are involved with. … We can learn
from asteroids about how life came to be in the solar system. There's a
lot of information there that it is waiting to be harvested in terms of
the nature of life from the asteroids. Scientifically they're every bit
as interesting as protecting the Earth from the occasional impact. … I
would say probably aside from more and more clever telescopes, actually
visiting asteroids is probably going to be the way in which we're going
to learn most about that big question of, did life predate the solar
system or was it actually invented here? [Building Apollo: Photos from Moonshot History]
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NASA astronaut Russell Schweickart's career-defining moment came thanks to a camera problem.
During a spacewalk on the Apollo 9 mission,
his colleague's movie camera jammed, and Schweickart was given an order
to sit tight for 5 minutes while the team troubleshot it. He was left
to look out at the vastness of space, and Earth within it. When he came
back home, he set about trying to inspire others with that experience.
He even joined with then-Soviet cosmonauts to do so. "We're the only
people who have seen the Earth with our own eyes as a single place of
all life," Schweickart told Space.com of space travelers. "Sure enough, I
found that my fellow cosmonauts felt the same way." [Apollo 9 in Photos: NASA Tests the Spidery Lunar Module]
NASA astronaut Russell L. Schweickart during a spacewalk in March 1969, as seen from inside the lunar module.
Credit: NASA
Much of Schweickart's energy has been directed toward planetary defense
from asteroid impacts through the nonprofit he founded, called the B612 Foundation. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Space.com: What do you think is missing from current conversations about space and space exploration? Russell Schweickart: While the pragmatic elements of
space exploration, or space utilization actually, are talked about most
frequently, the implications of humanity moving outward from the planet
to me are the most important long-term things. But they get to be a
little airy-fairy, so people generally don't talk about those kinds of
things. It's not religious but is sort of philosophical, and those
[implications] are less pragmatic, less immediate, they're not as much
fun to most people as the competition or the technology per se. But to
me it is the longer-term implications of humanity moving outward from
the planet, looking back, realizing the preciousness of the Earth as a
home of life, taking care of the planet while moving out. It's not the
cowboy mentality of, 'we've trashed this place, let's move on to the
other one.' Being born from your mother is when you start loving your
mother, it's not when you end loving your mother, [even if] you may have
partially trashed her in the process of being born. … Space development
utilizes a lot of resources — water, fuel, energy, etc., etc. — and the
pace of space development is going to depend in the long run upon the economics
of developing consumables in space and not continuing to dig up the
Earth. … There's resources galore out in space, for example, in the
asteroids, and people have talked about asteroid mining but the
economics of that has not really been studied well.
Space.com: It's interesting that you mention asteroids as a
potential resource, but are also involved in talking about those
asteroids as threats with the B612 Foundation. Schweickart:Asteroids
are multi-dimensional. … In order to protect the Earth, you've got to
know where the asteroids are and where they're headed, and we realized
at one point several years ago that when we really think about that in
the larger context, we have to develop a dynamic map of the inner solar
system. … But as soon as you think about that, that map is necessary for
all of the other aspects, whether it's exploring the asteroids for
science or as exploration venues or goals for human exploration, or for
that matter for the exploitation ultimately of space resources. That
idea of creating a dynamic map is an essential first step for all of the
different dimensions that asteroids are involved with. … We can learn
from asteroids about how life came to be in the solar system. There's a
lot of information there that it is waiting to be harvested in terms of
the nature of life from the asteroids. Scientifically they're every bit
as interesting as protecting the Earth from the occasional impact. … I
would say probably aside from more and more clever telescopes, actually
visiting asteroids is probably going to be the way in which we're going
to learn most about that big question of, did life predate the solar
system or was it actually invented here? [Building Apollo: Photos from Moonshot History]
Space.com: What have you learned from your experience working with government? Schweickart: The international geopolitical
environment is frankly more important than any of the technological
challenges of protecting the Earth from asteroid impacts. All of the
issue of finding asteroids
out there, getting them into a database, knowing their orbits, being
able to predict an impact years ahead of time, being able to have the
technology ready to deflect an asteroid — all of those things frankly
pale in comparison, ironically, with the geopolitical decision to act. …
You're going to have to make a decision to act to protect the Earth
decades ahead of when the impact would occur. Half of your population
that elected you to be the head of their nation don't believe there's
such a thing as an asteroid, let alone one that's going to hit them and
wipe them out. And you're going to be going for re-election in five
years and you've got to be part of spending $500 million or $1 billion. …
We will probably be hit a couple times needlessly before we finally get
around to the point of using the technology to protect the Earth from
the next impact. Geopolitics, whether it's at the national level or the
international level, is ultimately tied in very, very directly with the
ultimate survival of life on Earth. The technology generally speaking
will come along and is simple in comparison — it's more fun to design
it. Designing geopolitical systems is a pain in the butt and it's a
mess. … Antarctica is in my mind the best model that we have so far of
responsible governance in non-sovereign territory. Space is a non-sovereign territory and it ought to remain non-sovereign, and I think we need to seriously look at how that governance should occur.
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