Looking Earthward From Space

From Apollo Eight, the famous view of planet Earth as seen from the Moon in December 1968. Credit NASA, via European Pressphoto Agency
From Apollo Eight, the famous view of planet Earth as seen from the Moon in December 1968. Credit NASA, via European Pressphoto Agency

Of all human spaceflight, Apollo 8 may have best demonstrated NASA’s capacity to change human perspective. In reflecting upon that mission, the first circumnavigation of the moon, the astronaut Bill Anders, one of three on board, said, “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” Anders had taken the photograph that came to be known as “Earthrise,” the first image of the planet captured by a human from beyond Earth’s orbit. As his fellow crew member Jim Lovell would point out, “Suddenly, everybody could see the Earth as it truly is: a grand oasis in the vastness of space.”

It may seem counterintuitive to think that space exploration, with all its attendant risk and glory, primarily sheds light on our own home planet. But it does. This week marks the 60th anniversary of NASA’s founding. For the past two years, we have been making a documentary about NASA, and that idea was pretty much echoed by all 45 of the astronauts, scientists, administrators and historians we interviewed.

Very early on, NASA uncovered two important truths. First, that our planet was the only one in our solar system with an environment capable of supporting human life and, therefore, extraordinarily unique. And second, that earth’s environment was fundamentally fragile, protected by a thin iridescent layer of atmosphere and susceptible to damage at the hands of the planet’s inhabitants.

This has become increasingly apparent as Earth warms from greenhouse gas emissions. NASA now finds itself in the odd position of monitoring a developing planetary crisis that President Trump himself has dismissed. Fortunately, efforts by his administration to cut four missions under the agency’s earth science program that monitor the planet were blocked by Congress this year.

In his book “Broca’s Brain,” the astronomer Carl Sagan wrote, “By far the most exciting, satisfying and exhilarating time to be alive is the time in which we pass from ignorance to knowledge.” Over the past six decades, NASA has led us in that journey, changing not only our understanding of the universe but also of ourselves.

During the Apollo program, NASA realized that the same instruments it was using to provide scientific data for the moon landings could be put into orbit to look down at our own world. In 1972, the government launched the first Landsat satellite with remote sensing equipment capable of measuring the surface of the Earth and tracking it over time.

While this Earth science work would always be a relatively small line in NASA’s budget, the agency added to the program in the ensuing decades. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush endorsed NASA’s Mission to Planet Earth, an effort to understand how the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere functioned as a system. President Bush called it “one of the nation’s most encompassing and urgent scientific programs.”

As part of the effort, NASA brought together oceanographers, geologists, meteorologists and other specialists under the banner of a new discipline called Earth system science. It would launch over two dozen satellites designed to study all aspects of Earth’s climate.

From space, NASA can directly and continuously measure and monitor almost every aspect of the earth’s systems: the oceans, deserts, ice sheets, clouds, rain and the vegetation coming and going. And then we have the data from scientists doing fieldwork across the planet, from Greenland to Palau, Antarctica to the Arctic.

The information NASA gathers is shared with other government agencies and organizations around the globe, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Agriculture and Defense Departments, and many more. NASA also feeds this data into computer models, which both provide a record of how our planet’s environment is changing over time and tell us what the future may hold. The satellite measurements are the difference between ignorance and knowledge, and they leave no doubt that our planet is warming at a rapidly accelerating rate. What this means for us is not just a rise in temperature but also droughts, fires, floods, hurricanes and other extreme weather.

As the NASA astronaut and climate scientist Piers Sellers, who died in 2016, said: “We’ve built our civilization around the current climate. Our coastal cities, our food resources, our water resources: They’re all pegged to the current climate. And there’s not much slack in the system.” Yet these NASA models are telling us that as global temperatures warm, we’ll be looking at a very different planet.

Of all of NASA’s many remarkable accomplishments, the acquisition and parsing of this knowledge has been its greatest contribution. By alerting us to the crisis that is climate change, NASA has given humankind a chance. But as a nonpartisan civilian agency, this is where NASA stops. It provides us with the data and then leaves it up to us, through our elected leaders, to act.

About 60 years ago, not long after NASA’s founding, President John F. Kennedy challenged us to put a man on the moon. It was a time when the entire country united around the right goal at the right time and, despite all reasonable expectation, triumphed. Today, we face a far greater challenge — to protect our planet. But the question is, where is our leadership now? Who do we have to unite us?

Tragically, despite all of the data that NASA has accumulated and analyzed about the threat to our planet, President Trump has willfully chosen ignorance. It is a betrayal so complete, so profound and consequential that it will stand as his administration’s greatest crime.

Rory Kennedy is the director and producer of the forthcoming Discovery Channel documentary “Above and Beyond: NASA’s Journey to Tomorrow.” Mark Bailey is the film’s writer and producer.

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