It was in 1969 that Neil Armstrong first stepped on the Moon and took his one “small step” that won the space race for the United States and stunned disbelieving audiences around the world.
Now almost half a century on, Nasa has said that it will not give up in its mission to send humans to other planets and by the end of the 2020s it will have astronauts on the Moon again, ready to launch craft to get humans onto Mars.
But to reach that next frontier, 34 million miles away, the world’s foremost space agency has enlisted the help of a philosophy student from the University of Glasgow to make it happen.
A new PhD programme will see a student develop the philosophical understanding of the risk necessary to send men and women back to the Moon, and this time to stay there.
The programme, which is currently in the last stages of receiving backing from the UK government’s research funding bodies, will partner with Nasa to analyse the way that its safety reports are constructed and the philosophy of causation that underpins them.
Dr Neil McDonnell, who will oversee the new PhD in the Philosophy of Safety Engineering, was asked to visit the space agency last year to see what he could contribute to their latest projects.
He said: “Causation is something philosophers care a lot about, because there is no stuff in the world that you can see under a microscope that is called ‘causation’.
“So the question we have to ask is, are we always right when we say that throwing the rock causes the window to break?
There is a concept of causation in there that we need to analyse and understand properly.
Until recently, Nasa had made hardly a peep or an attempt to travel to the Moon since 1972, and one of the reasons they hadn’t attempted it is because there was some resolution passed in the States which said you couldn’t send astronauts into space unless there was no risk.”
He added: “Well, of course there’s never no risk.”
Famous disasters like the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle in 1986 were cleared for safe take-off before components failed.
Safety cases are always put forward for new expeditions, and can be explored afterwards to understand what went wrong.
Dr McDonnell added: “We happen to know that they are using very old-fashioned theories of causation and logic, so what we need to do is understand what they’re using now, and know what current theories from philosophy are better than the old stuff.”
The University of Glasgow student will spend up to six months in Nasa’s research centre in Langley, Virginia, analysing the safety reports of previous missions, as well as time in Scotland exploring the metaphysics and epistemology needed to combine complex aerospace engineering and the study of philosophy.
The student will then use philosophy to better understand why rockets sometimes go wrong, and will make what Dr McDonnell calls a “useful and serious” contribution to Nasa’s risky venture to establish a permanent base on the Moon.
President Donald Trump authorised the new Exploration Campaign in late 2017.
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