Why invest in fundamental research? A former Nazi explains

Here in today’s modern world, it may not seem like investing in basic, fundamental research is a necessity anymore. Instead, our society focuses much more on technological and engineering applications of already-known science. Technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, powerful rockets and satellite internet, and pharmaceutical medications seem to generate much more interest — from both public and private funding sources — than fundamental research into the nature of space, matter, life, or disease. Instead of focusing resources into new, cutting-edge science facilities, the scientific leader of the free world for many decades, the United States, is slashing government spending in vital areas, including for basic, fundamental research.

Some will argue that we have better, more important, and more urgent tasks to fund than something that leads to long-term benefits like science. Others will point to instances where science drew incorrect conclusions in the past, arguing that science is a fundamentally untrustworthy endeavor as a result. And still others minimize the very real problems that society faces, from pandemics to the climate crisis to public mistrust of essential life-saving medical interventions, like vaccines.

However, investing in science — and becoming a world that values, is aware of, and appreciative of science and what it brings to all of us — is one of the most essential functions of any successful human society, and always has been. Here’s a story you may not have heard that illustrates this in an incredibly profound fashion.

This reconstruction of particle tracks shows a candidate Higgs event in the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Note how even with the clear signatures and transverse tracks, there is a shower of other particles; this is due to the fact that protons are composite particles, and due to the fact that dozens of proton-proton collisions occur with every bunch crossing. At higher energies, discoveries that don’t appear at lower energies become possible. Modern particle detectors are like a layer-cake, with the ability to track the particle debris in order to reconstruct what happened as close to the collision point as possible.

It should be relatively simple to understand that the greatest problems that face humans living on planet Earth are puzzles that need to be solved. Hard problems, especially, require a long-term investment in order to sufficiently address them, and often require us, collectively, to gain new knowledge in order to even fully understand what these problems are and how a solution can be achieved. And yet, we’ve solved a great many problems in exactly this fashion: through hard work, research, development, and continued advances that build upon a series of prior advances. For especially hard problems, the key breakthroughs may only occur after years, decades, or even centuries of work.

Some of these advances have been profound.

• The ability to provide billions of humans with clean air and clean water, even after widespread industrialization.
• Rocketry and the science of spaceflight, which led humanity to break the bonds of gravity that had confined us to Earth for so long.
• The development and widespread adoption of vaccines, preventing life-threatening illnesses from killing or disabling millions.
• The ability to identify the cause of destruction of our ozone layer, and to collectively ban the use of the chemical that caused it.
• And the ultra-profound advance to reconstruct the origin and history of our Universe: answering perhaps the greatest existential question of all.

From the structure of matter to matters of life and death, science has enabled practically all of the great advances throughout the history of human civilization: advances that we often take for granted.

The launch of Cassini, on October 15, 1997. This spectacular streak shot was taken from Hangar AF on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, with a solid rocket booster retrieval ship in the foreground. The lessons we learn from exploring the Universe often translate to improvements in the quality of life here on Earth, albeit not immediately.

And yet, it’s easy to see that there are still tremendous problems that we face: both collectively and individually. In certain places in the world, problems such as poverty, war, oppression, slavery, disease, and starvation run rampant. Additionally, there are existential problems faced by humanity: global climate change, the threat of nuclear war, deforestation and ecological habitat loss, an increasing need for energy coupled with scarcities of food and water, along with increasingly devastating natural disasters: hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires, and much more.

With all of these problems facing the world, as well as the humans in it, it might seem like investing in fundamental science — even in the fundamental science that’s most likely to address the underlying causes of the problems and puzzles we face today — is a fool’s errand.

After all, it’s easy to make a statement like, “Investing in science is investing in the betterment of humanity.” But it’s a lot more difficult to see how that’s true, particularly when there are egregious forms of human suffering right in front of our faces. This isn’t a new problem; people have felt this way for as long as history has been recorded.

Food insecurity is a major problem in many countries, including Senegal, shown here, which imports a large fraction of its food staples, such as rice, from other countries: India, Thailand, and Vietnam. When the price of rice increases, or the supply drops due to poor harvests, famine and starvation spike, particularly afflicting low-income households.

Back in early 1970, shortly after the first Apollo landing, a nun working in Zambia, Africa, Sister Mary Jucunda, wrote to NASA. She asked how they could justify spending billions on the Apollo program when children were starving to death. If one pictures these two images side-by-side, it hardly seems fair. The letter somehow made it to the desk of one of the top rocket scientists at NASA: Ernst Stuhlinger. At the time, Stuhlinger, one of the scientists brought to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip at the conclusion of World War II, was serving as the Associate Director of Science at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Stuhlinger was himself an incredible scientist, working at the intersection of atomic science, electrical engineering and manipulation, and rocketry. He co-developed the ion engine for long-term thrust in spaceflight, and earned his doctorate at the young age of 23: under the tutelage of Hans Geiger, for whom the Geiger counter is famously named. His scientific expertise, under Werner Von Braun, was particularly in the development of guidance systems: systems with profound applications in both wartime and peacetime.

Facing an accusation of inhumanity must have been particularly painful for someone who was still often accused of being a Nazi for his role in Germany’s World War II rocket program, but Stuhlinger was unshaken by Jucunda’s letter. He wrote the following in response, reprinted in its entirety (augmented only by the insertion of images that were not included in the original letter), to answer the question of why investing in fundamental research is important, even in the most strenuous of times.

This 1958 photograph shows six scientists in the United States with a model of the Explorer-1 rocket. At far right, Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger is standing, next to Dr. Werner Von Braun (seated). Together, these two men were among the many former Nazis that were brought to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip: to secure their scientific knowledge and talents.

Your letter was one of many which are reaching me every day, but it has touched me more deeply than all the others because it came so much from the depths of a searching mind and a compassionate heart. I will try to answer your question as best as I possibly can.

First, however, I would like to express my great admiration for you, and for all your many brave sisters, because you are dedicating your lives to the noblest cause of man: help for his fellowmen who are in need.

You asked in your letter how I could suggest the expenditures of billions of dollars for a voyage to Mars, at a time when many children on this earth are starving to death. I know that you do not expect an answer such as “Oh, I did not know that there are children dying from hunger, but from now on I will desist from any kind of space research until mankind has solved that problem!” In fact, I have known of famined children long before I knew that a voyage to the planet Mars is technically feasible. However, I believe, like many of my friends, that travelling to the Moon and eventually to Mars and to other planets is a venture which we should undertake now, and I even believe that this project, in the long run, will contribute more to the solution of these grave problems we are facing here on earth than many other potential projects of help which are debated and discussed year after year, and which are so extremely slow in yielding tangible results.

Apollo 11 brought humans onto the surface of the Moon for the first time in 1969. Shown here is Buzz Aldrin setting up the Solar Wind experiment as part of Apollo 11, with Neil Armstrong snapping the photograph.

Before trying to describe in more detail how our space program is contributing to the solution of our earthly problems, I would like to relate briefly a supposedly true story, which may help support the argument. About 400 years ago, there lived a count in a small town in Germany. He was one of the benign counts, and he gave a large part of his income to the poor in his town. This was much appreciated, because poverty was abundant during medieval times, and there were epidemics of the plague which ravaged the country frequently. One day, the count met a strange man. He had a workbench and little laboratory in his house, and he labored hard during the daytime so that he could afford a few hours every evening to work in his laboratory. He ground small lenses from pieces of glass; he mounted the lenses in tubes, and he used these gadgets to look at very small objects. The count was particularly fascinated by the tiny creatures that could be observed with the strong magnification, and which he had never seen before. He invited the man to move with his laboratory to the castle, to become a member of the count’s household, and to devote henceforth all his time to the development and perfection of his optical gadgets as a special employee of the count.

The townspeople, however, became angry when they realized that the count was wasting his money, as they thought, on a stunt without purpose. “We are suffering from this plague” they said, “while he is paying that man for a useless hobby!” But the count remained firm. “I give you as much as I can afford,” he said, “but I will also support this man and his work, because I know that someday something will come out of it!”

Ultraviolet, visible, and infrared lasers can all be used to break apart graphene oxide to create sheets of graphene using the technique of laser-engraving. The right panels show scanning electron microscope images of the graphene produced at various scales. All of the advances in modern microscopy can trace their origins back toward early experiments with optical lenses, which date back many hundreds of years.

Indeed, something very good came out of this work, and also out of similar work done by others at other places: the microscope. It is well known that the microscope has contributed more than any other invention to the progress of medicine, and that the elimination of the plague and many other contagious diseases from most parts of the world is largely a result of studies which the microscope made possible.

The count, by retaining some of his spending money for research and discovery, contributed far more to the relief of human suffering than he could have contributed by giving all he could possibly spare to his plague-ridden community.

The situation which we are facing today is similar in many respects. The President of the United States is spending about 200 billion dollars in his yearly budget. This money goes to health, education, welfare, urban renewal, highways, transportation, foreign aid, defense, conservation, science, agriculture and many installations inside and outside the country. About 1.6 percent of this national budget was allocated to space exploration this year. The space program includes Project Apollo, and many other smaller projects in space physics, space astronomy, space biology, planetary projects, earth resources projects, and space engineering. To make this expenditure for the space program possible, the average American taxpayer with 10,000 dollars income per year is paying about 30 tax dollars for space. The rest of his income, 9,970 dollars, remains for his subsistence, his recreation, his savings, his other taxes, and all his other expenditures. You will probably ask now: “Why don’t you take 5 or 3 or 1 dollar out of the 30 space dollars which the average American taxpayer is paying, and send these dollars to the hungry children?” To answer this question, I have to explain briefly how the economy of this country works. The situation is very similar in other countries. The government consists of a number of departments (Interior, Justice, Health, Education and Welfare, Transportation, Defense, and others) and the bureaus (National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and others). All of them prepare their yearly budgets according to their assigned missions, and each of them must defend its budget against extremely severe screening by congressional committees, and against heavy pressure for economy from the Bureau of the Budget and the President. When the funds are finally appropriated by Congress, they can be spent only for the line items specified and approved in the budget.

This seemingly idyllic 2012 photo of a village in North Korea, along the Yalu River delta, papers over an inconvenient truth about food insecurity within the country. By leveling forests to make room for more farmland in the late 20th century, the threat of famine has been omnipresent in North Korea ever since, as the landscape has been altered in a fashion that makes the entire country less resilient to the effects of floods and droughts. Had North Korea based their agricultural practices on the best science of the day, this would not have led to the starvation of millions of North Koreans over the years.

The budget of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, naturally, can contain only items directly related to aeronautics and space. If this budget were not approved by Congress, the funds proposed for it would not be available for something else; they would simply not be levied from the taxpayer, unless one of the other budgets had obtained approval for a specific increase which would then absorb the funds not spent for space. You realize from this brief discourse that support for hungry children, or rather a support in addition to what the United States is already contributing to this very worthy cause in the form of foreign aid, can be obtained only if the appropriate department submits a budget line item for this purpose, and if this line item is then approved by Congress.

You may ask now whether I personally would be in favor of such a move by our government. My answer is an emphatic yes. Indeed, I would not mind at all if my annual taxes were increased by a number of dollars for the purpose of feeding hungry children, wherever they may live.

I know that all of my friends feel the same way. However, we could not bring such a program to life merely by desisting from making plans for voyages to Mars. On the contrary, I even believe that by working for the space program I can make some contribution to the relief and eventual solution of such grave problems as poverty and hunger on earth. Basic to the hunger problem are two functions: the production of food and the distribution of food. Food production by agriculture, cattle ranching, ocean fishing and other large-scale operations is efficient in some parts of the world, but drastically deficient in many others. For example, large areas of land could be utilized far better if efficient methods of watershed control, fertilizer use, weather forecasting, fertility assessment, plantation programming, field selection, planting habits, timing of cultivation, crop survey, and harvest planning were applied.

It’s the combination of moving air, temperature, and moisture content that creates storms and weather patterns on Earth. By disrupting air movement, wind turbines have the potential to change the weather, for better and for worse. This is an area where the science demands that we not only study the impact of human activity, but that we continuously monitor the entire planet, including from space, to understand how and where various weather phenomena arise.

The best tool for the improvement of all these functions, undoubtedly, is the artificial earth satellite. Circling the globe at a high altitude, it can screen wide areas of land within a short time; it can observe and measure a large variety of factors indicating the status and condition of crops, soil, droughts, rainfall, snow cover, etc., and it can radio this information to ground stations for appropriate use. It has been estimated that even a modest system of earth satellites equipped with earth resources, sensors, working within a program for worldwide agricultural improvements, will increase the yearly crops by an equivalent of many billions of dollars.

The distribution of the food to the needy is a completely different problem. The question is not so much one of shipping volume, it is one of international cooperation. The ruler of a small nation may feel very uneasy about the prospect of having large quantities of food shipped into his country by a large nation, simply because he fears that along with the food there may also be an import of influence and foreign power. Efficient relief from hunger, I am afraid, will not come before the boundaries between nations have become less divisive than they are today. I do not believe that space flight will accomplish this miracle over night. However, the space program is certainly among the most promising and powerful agents working in this direction.

Let me only remind you of the recent near-tragedy of Apollo 13. When the time of the crucial reentry of the astronauts approached, the Soviet Union discontinued all Russian radio transmissions in the frequency bands used by the Apollo Project in order to avoid any possible interference, and Russian ships stationed themselves in the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans in case an emergency rescue would become necessary. Had the astronaut capsule touched down near a Russian ship, the Russians would undoubtedly have expended as much care and effort in their rescue as if Russian cosmonauts had returned from a space trip. If Russian space travelers should ever be in a similar emergency situation, Americans would do the same without any doubt.

The wreckage of the Soyuz 1 mission included a fire that was so catastrophic that it took multiple teams and many attempts to extinguish the flaming wreckage. Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was killed by multiple blunt force trauma during the catastrophic descent and re-entry. He became the first human to die in a spaceflight.

Higher food production through survey and assessment from orbit, and better food distribution through improved international relations, are only two examples of how profoundly the space program will impact life on earth. I would like to quote two other examples: stimulation of technological development, and generation of scientific knowledge.

The requirements for high precision and for extreme reliability which must be imposed upon the components of a moon-travelling spacecraft are entirely unprecedented in the history of engineering. The development of systems which meet these severe requirements has provided us a unique opportunity to find new material and methods, to invent better technical systems, to improve manufacturing procedures, to lengthen the lifetimes of instruments, and even to discover new laws of nature.

All this newly acquired technical knowledge is also available for application to earth-bound technologies. Every year, about a thousand technical innovations generated in the space program find their ways into our earthly technology where they lead to better kitchen appliances and farm equipment, better sewing machines and radios, better ships and airplanes, better weather forecasting and storm warning, better communications, better medical instruments, better utensils and tools for everyday life. Presumably, you will ask now why we must develop first a life support system for our moon-travelling astronauts, before we can build a remote-reading sensor system for heart patients.

The answer is simple: significant progress in the solutions of technical problems is frequently made not by a direct approach, but by first setting a goal of high challenge which offers a strong motivation for innovative work, which fires the imagination and spurs men to expend their best efforts, and which acts as a catalyst by including chains of other reactions.

Spaceflight without any doubt is playing exactly this role. The voyage to Mars will certainly not be a direct source of food for the hungry. However, it will lead to so many new technologies and capabilities that the spin-offs from this project alone will be worth many times the cost of its implementation.

NASA’s Perseverance rover puts its robotic arm to work around a rocky outcrop called “Skinner Ridge” in Mars’ Jezero Crater. Numerous organic compounds have already been identified in the Martian soils present at this location by Perseverance, but “organics,” despite the implications of that word, usually have nothing to do with life at all; it simply indicates a molecule containing a carbon-hydrogen bond. As of 2025, there have been no crewed attempts at landing on Mars.

Besides the need for new technologies, there is a continuing great need for new basic knowledge in the sciences if we wish to improve the conditions of human life on earth.

We need more knowledge in physics and chemistry, in biology and physiology, and very particularly in medicine to cope with all these problems which threaten man’s life: hunger, disease, contamination of food and water, pollution of the environment.

We need more young men and women who choose science as a career and we need better support for those scientists who have the talent and the determination to engage in fruitful research work. Challenging research objectives must be available, and sufficient support for research projects must be provided. Again, the space program with its wonderful opportunities to engage in truly magnificent research studies of moons and planets, of physics and astronomy, of biology and medicine is an almost ideal catalyst which induces the reaction between the motivation for scientific work, opportunities to observe exciting phenomena of nature, and material support needed to carry out the research effort.

Among all the activities which are directed, controlled, and funded by the American government, the space program is certainly the most visible and probably the most debated activity, although it consumes only 1.6 percent of the total national budget, and 3 per mille [less than one-third of 1 percent] of the gross national product. As a stimulant and catalyst for the development of new technologies, and for research in the basic sciences, it is unparalleled by any other activity. In this respect, we may even say that the space program is taking over a function which for three or four thousand years has been the sad prerogative of wars.

How much human suffering can be avoided if nations, instead of competing with their bomb-dropping fleets of airplanes and rockets, compete with their moon-travelling space ships! This competition is full of promise for brilliant victories, but it leaves no room for the bitter fate of the vanquished, which breeds nothing but revenge and new wars.

This photograph shows the first view, with human eyes, of the Earth rising over the limb of the Moon, taken mere minutes after the original Earthrise photo (in black-and-white) was snapped. The discovery of the Earth from space, with human eyes, remains one of the most iconic achievements in our species’ history. Apollo 8, which occurred during December of 1968, was one of the essential precursor missions to a successful Moon landing. This photo is arguably the most environmentally impactful one ever taken, and a copy of it was enclosed with Ernst Stuhlinger’s 1970 letter to Sister Mary Jucunda.

Although our space program seems to lead us away from our earth and out toward the moon, the sun, the planets, and the stars, I believe that none of these celestial objects will find as much attention and study by space scientists as our earth. It will become a better earth, not only because of all the new technological and scientific knowledge which we will apply to the betterment of life, but also because we are developing a far deeper appreciation of our earth, of life, and of man.

The photograph which I enclose with this letter shows a view of our earth as seen from Apollo 8 when it orbited the moon at Christmas, 1968. Of all the many wonderful results of the space program so far, this picture may be the most important one. It opened our eyes to the fact that our earth is a beautiful and most precious island in an unlimited void, and that there is no other place for us to live but the thin surface layer of our planet, bordered by the bleak nothingness of space. Never before did so many people recognize how limited our earth really is, and how perilous it would be to tamper with its ecological balance. Ever since this picture was first published, voices have become louder and louder warning of the grave problems that confront man in our times: pollution, hunger, poverty, urban living, food production, water control, overpopulation. It is certainly not by accident that we begin to see the tremendous tasks waiting for us at a time when the young space age has provided us the first good look at our own planet.

Very fortunately though, the space age not only holds out a mirror in which we can see ourselves, it also provides us with the technologies, the challenge, the motivation, and even with the optimism to attack these tasks with confidence. What we learn in our space program, I believe, is fully supporting what Albert Schweitzer had in mind when he said: “I am looking at the future with concern, but with good hope.”

My very best wishes will always be with you, and with your children.

Very sincerely yours,
Ernst Stuhlinger
Associate Director for Science

This graph shows the inflation-adjusted budget of NASA’s entire science portfolio, including its four main subdivisions of astrophysics, Earth science, planetary science, and heliophysics. The proposed cuts by the current administration would decrease funding to levels that precede the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.

That was the end of Stuhlinger’s letter: a letter that, except for the few references (such as budgets and the recency of Apollo 13) that date it back to the time of its authorship in 1970, a full 55 years ago, feels as though it could have been written today. I like to think that nearly everyone in the world, if it were presented to them in this fashion, would share Stuhlinger’s vision, along with a commitment to invest in the long term prosperity of Earth and of humans on Earth. Stuhlinger certainly lived up to it in his post-World War II life.

He was the driving force behind Explorer 1, the United States’ first satellite to orbit the Earth, launched just months after Sputnik. Stuhlinger dreamed of a manned mission to Mars as early as 1958, and advocated for increased investment in science and exploration throughout his entire life. And after a very long NASA career, he passed away, at the age of 94, back in 2008, as one of the last surviving members of Operation Paperclip.

And as for Sister Mary Jucunda? After receiving the letter and photo from Stuhlinger, she wrote back a very brief letter, simply stating the following:

“Thank you — from now on, I firmly believe in the profound value of the space program.”

May we all be as open to considering the value of things that don’t directly and immediately affect us, and to consider the benefit of all of humanity, in total, when we consider what the right course of action is.