Exploration drives innovation and builds prosperity.
That’s true for the United States.
Four hundred years ago this year, three small ships – the Goodspeed, Susan Constant and Discovery – approached a vast wilderness. A small group of men landed at Jamestown, including their soon-to-be leader, Captain John Smith. And 166 years later, another small ship in another great ocean sailed through the Golden Gate of San Francisco Bay, led by Captain Juan Ayala.
Those explorers had indirect partners, the craftsmen and inventors of what became known as the Age of Exploration. Traveling across unknown seas required new innovations like better clocks and navigation equipment. So an entire class of clockmakers and carpenters, shipwrights and mechanics rose in order to fill those needs. And they prospered by meeting them.
Aided by those innovations, more and more colonists came to America. They began to build a country from a continent, and their descendants became citizens, in states united by a Constitution. With each step of discovery came innovation and, eventually, prosperity. There were steamships and sewing machines, lightning rods and a golden spike.
The continent has been crossed countless times since then, yet Americans have never forgotten the frontier. And 183 years after Ayala sailed into San Francisco Bay, the first U.S. satellite went up, a small craft aptly named Explorer I.
As before, waves of innovation and prosperity followed that reach into the unknown. In fact, the microprocessor was born of a competition between Fairchild and Intel to build components small enough to fit in a spacecraft. And about 10 years after the early height of the U.S. space program, the first personal and business computers were introduced.
Other innovations like cordless tools, medical monitors and weather satellites have followed.
That’s not a coincidence. Discovery drives innovation, which creates prosperity.
That’s been true in the past. Yet how can it hold true in decades to follow? And how can we ensure that America leads the world in innovation, productivity and prosperity throughout the 21st century?
The same way we’ve done so in the past: exploring, opening new frontiers and constantly innovating. Moreover, our nation seems to innovate – and prosper – the most when faced with the greatest and most sustained challenges.
That’s what space offers. Space is a hard place – vast reaches with few, or any of the necessities for life. Yet because space is such a hard place, it presents vast opportunities for innovation.
At NASA, we’ve been given the charge and challenge of stepping beyond low Earth orbit and opening a way of exploration to the moon, Mars and beyond. Step by step and launch by launch, we’ll bring worlds of possibility within reach.
Meeting the challenge of space will require steady funding and a sustained commitment. But a sustained commitment to space exploration also means a sustained commitment to innovation, and to the likely consequence of prosperity.
Along the way, we’re forming partnerships with some of the most inventive companies in America. Many of them are located here, in Silicon Valley. For instance, our partnership with Google will soon allow every American to experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon or through the canyons of Mars. That will make NASA’s space exploration work accessible to everyone.
Steeled by the past and with an unwavering eye to the future, NASA is working on new ships for a new era of exploration.
The parallels between the eras of exploration are striking – small, and perhaps what will someday be seen as primitive, craft, carrying little companies across vast empty spaces to new worlds of possibility. Then as now, hardship is guaranteed. And failure will still be part of the process.
Yet the possibilities are greater than anything that those first colonists could have dreamed. After all, exploration, innovation and economic growth go hand in hand.
