First oil

“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you,” — Paul Simon of Simon & Garfunkel, 1968.

Joe DiMaggio, the iconic baseball player with the New York Yankees, is long gone. Withering from neglect and underfunding is another American iconic institution—the National Aeronautics & Space Administration’s (NASA’s) human spaceflight program. If he’s still in a creative mood, I would like Paul Simon to write a ballad about NASA and its manned mission to the moon, one of the greatest technological achievements of our time.

Inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, NASA achieved a series of space milestones, through its Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs, culminating in landing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, on July 20, 1969, six months before Kennedy’s deadline. Since then, NASA has carried out the space shuttle program and continues to participate in the International Space Station (ISS). The space shuttle program ended in 2012, and the ISS is expected to end in 2015.

President George Bush had announced plans to return to the moon in 2020 and then onward to Mars. However, President Barack Obama cancelled the project in 2010. There are no awe-inspiring, piloted space projects on the drawing boards. Sadly, the U.S. has had to depend on Russia to transport astronauts to the ISS. In an odd transition to privatization after significant retrenchment of its manned mission staff, NASA will depend on two private companies—Boeing and Space X—to transport U.S. astronauts to the ISS. As such, NASA today is a downsized shell of the NASA of the Apollo days.

Since its formation in 1958, NASA has been a cornucopia of technology spin-offs that have helped create the modern technology-based civilization we now enjoy. The oil and gas industry has advanced through NASA’s pioneering work in miniaturization of electronic circuits, software development, advances in durable materials, and scanning technologies. Even now, oil industry executives talk of adopting NASA’s testing protocols to improve oilfield safety and reliability.

NASA is continuing its unmanned exploration missions to Mars and beyond. The oilfield industry has made several contributions to the Mars project, including Baker Hughes working with NASA’s Mars Drill team to develop a specialized drilling rig to obtain samples of Martian rock. On Sept. 21, NASA’s Maven spacecraft began orbiting Mars to study the planet’s atmosphere through eight scientific sensors. Interestingly, the Maven was joined two days later by Mangalyaan, an orbiter launched by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).

Mars has become a busy place for human activity. Three other orbiters are revolving around Mars—NASA’s Odyssey and Reconnaissance, and the European Space Agency’s Mars Express. NASA also has two rovers, Opportunity and Curiosity, operating on the Martian surface.

It cost ISRO only $70 million to launch Mangalyaan, leading Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to explain, “It costs Rs. 10 ($0.17) to take a 15-km, auto rickshaw ride in the Indian city of Ahmedabad. ISRO was able to launch its satellite to a distance of 695 million km at a cost of only Rs. 7 ($0.12) per km.”

In the coming decades, we must have a revitalized NASA to spin off new technologies, and ISRO to dramatize cost-efficiency as we travel to Mars and beyond. What NASA created with human flight to the moon cannot be sealed in a time capsule and put away in storage.

It is our duty to explore the universe. There are “star treks” in our future. There will be a Captain James T. Kirk, leading the USS Enterprise to “explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Our industry will be there, in a new incarnation, to take on energy challenges, whether it is through exploration, production or transportation.