Caty Pilachowski '71 believes NASA needs to think big.

In 1969, man landed on the moon for the first time. Less than a century later, NASA may have the technology to reach the stars.

“Within the next 50 to 100 years, we will have the ability to build an unmanned spacecraft that we could fly to another star,” says astronomer Caty Pilachowski ’71, who served as president of the influential American Astronomical Society from 2002 to 2004. “If we developed a propulsion system that could achieve 10 percent of the speed of light, an unmanned spacecraft could reach a star 10 light years away in 100 years or so. Information from the craft would take 10 years to get back to Earth (via radio waves which travel at light speed).

“That’s a long time in the taxpayers’ mind,” says Pilachowski, who now holds the Kirkwood Chair in Astronomy at Indiana University. “My sense is that such a project would not help anybody get elected. But once in office, advocating for a bigger dream would be a very positive thing for a president to do. Our current president (George Bush) has done that. He is working with NASA to develop a manned mission to Mars.”

The Mars mission has been controversial because it pulls funds from other projects. “NASA has a lot of things on its plate,” says Pilachowski. “It has to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, finish the International Space Station and build a replacement for the shuttle. And scientists want NASA to continue all the planetary missions and science exploration.

“The realignment of NASA to fund the Martian science program has realigned all the other things NASA does, too. On the other hand, I think NASA needs a broader vision that leads to new frontiers. Mars is that new frontier.”

Certainly NASA had that broader vision in the 1960s, when it raced to beat the Soviet Union to the moon. The race to be first spurred NASA to innovate with incredible speed, and led to a bonanza of secondary benefits for science, education and the economy.

“I doubt the visionaries of the early ’60s could have foreseen all the wonderful things that have come from the beginnings of space exploration: global satellite communications, weather forecasting, navigation, computing and so much more came from the great technology push driven by the space race,” says Pilachowski. “Certainly economic benefits will continue to come to us from a robust space technology development program, whatever the tangible goal. It doesn’t matter so much whether the goal is the Moon, Mars or a near-earth asteroid. The advances come from the technology development to get there. And the development of the space infrastructure needed to travel the Solar System will be good for science.”

Pilachowski’s own interest in space began in childhood as she absorbed science fact and science fiction from writers such as Isaac Asimov and Sir Fred Hoyle. She majored in physics at HMC, where she was exposed to the kind of interdisciplinary thinking necessary for a career in astrophysics, then earned her Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Hawaii.

“The first Moon landing occurred while I was a student at Harvey Mudd,” she recalls. “Certainly the interest in space exploration was strong then, but more importantly, the Apollo program led to many new opportunities for research, to new graduate programs, and to more interest in science everywhere. The sky was the limit—literally! In astronomy, it was a time of telescope building when many new large 4-m class telescopes were built, and research programs were growing. Great times for students.”

In her current research at Indiana, Pilachowski focuses on how stars evolve—concentrating on the period, 14 billion years ago, when the first stars formed in our Milky Way Galaxy. By studying the composition of stars formed then—and some of them still exist—scientists can piece together the galaxy’s early history.

Pilachowski understands that astronomers will have little luck answering the cosmic questions if the taxpayers don’t support their quest. So she takes time to connect with the populace. Each year, for example, Pilachowski and her colleagues at Indiana travel to the Indiana State Fair to talk about what’s new in the cosmos.

Fortunately, the public is intrigued by space, even though they must often get by with media sound bites on the subject. “When I meet people in the real world, they are really interested,” Pilachowski says. “For instance, they want to know how we know there are planets outside our solar system. They may see a snippet on the Web, or get two seconds on a radio show. They don’t get the kind of in-depth understanding they might have gotten in the 1960s. But I don’t think that diminishes the interest people have in these things.”

Pilachowski believes visionary projects such as a manned landing on Mars are likely to spur even more interest and help lure more students into science, mathematics and into the space program itself—just as they have in the past. “I’m always delighted with the number of kids, and even young adults, who want to be astronauts,” she says.

“The country has, of course, changed since the 1960s, and I don’t think the same sense of national purpose that we saw in the Apollo project could take hold now. But NASA needs real, sustaining goals leading to a robust future in space.”