Ozone loss and cancer

For people who specialise in irony, or just unfortunate coincidences, there is red meat in the reports of two presidential commissions, one of which was published a month ago, the other last Monday.

A president has the power to set up a commission, very much like a Royal Commission, on any matter of great public interest which is too serious and non-political to be left to political debate between the two parties in Congress. So it's understood that a presidential commission shall be non-partisan and recruited from the widest possible range of experts and public spokesmen, women, on the topic that's being looked into.

In the past 30 years, I suppose the two most famous presidential commissions have been the one with the chief justice of the United States as chairman that went into the question of who assassinated President John Kennedy. Before that, in 1951, there was a presidential commission set up by President Truman to go into all the circumstances under which the president – President Truman – had relieved General MacArthur of his supreme command in the Korean War.

Well, of the two presidential commission reports now to hand, let's look at the first, which came out a month ago.

It's the result of two years of a careful, expert survey into the future of space. Briefly, there would be, by the mid-1990s a manned space station which would serve as a repair centre for satellites and a base for sending spacecraft into orbit. Congress, by the way, has already approved that programme.

After the work of the Apollo missions which put men on the moon, what's anticipated or promised is a permanent, human colony on the moon. As many as 10,000 people living up there in another 70 years. By then, children would be being born on the moon and, presumably, live their lives there. Don't ask me why when they could be born in the English Lake District or on New Zealand's Canterbury Plain or in Vermont or southern France.

By that dizzy time, there would be a flock or ring of solar space stations to harness the sun's energy as – Texas and Aberdeen papers, please copy – to harness the sun's energy as a permanent inexhaustible source of power for the world. Our world. Of course it's presumed that there would be regular flights from the earth, special fares for senior citizens who wish to visit their unseen grandchildren, frisking away there on the moon.

These things, once the daring or preposterous fantasies of sci-fi – the New Oxford Dictionary supplement allows that abbreviation of science fiction – well, these things are now seriously predicted by serious men and women. The report of this National Commission on Space appointed by the president in 1984 is full of such predictions, giving a new meaning to Kipling's boast set to Elgar's music that 'wider still and wider may our bounds be set'.

Alas, for the credibility of those commission members, their conclusions were more or less drafted before the Challenger shuttle blew up in January within minutes of its launching and took the lives of the five men and two women of the crew. Nothing that has happened in as many years as I can recall has dealt such a wounding blow to American pride and American technology as the explosion of the Challenger.

The president appointed a special, so-called Shuttle Commission to look into that disaster. It was headed by a former Attorney General and Secretary of State, Mr William Rogers and its report came out on Monday. It found that the Challenger disaster had a single physical cause, the failure of a rocket joint, but it also blamed some of the rocket manufacturers and it discovered many problems of poor management and faulty exchange of information in the National Space Administration itself.

The really damning charge in a 256-page report that is otherwise, sober and judicious, is that five months before the Challenger took off and exploded, the Washington headquarters of the space agency had information about flaws in the booster rockets, so that as early as last August and through the intervening months, there were ranking technicians in NASA who had passed along the warning that the Challenger was unsafe to launch.

Since Challenger, there have been two failed satellite launches and one in Europe. NASA always had a reputation, in the community of experts and in the mind of the public, for safety at all costs. Needless to say, that reputation has been so badly dented that the administration doesn't care to set a date for the next manned shuttle and the report of that earlier commission on space now sounds like a desperate, whistling chorus in a graveyard.

The Rogers, the Shuttle, Commission however, is very upbeat in its conclusions. It believes that the errors can be corrected and that the space programme must go on.

I'm not claiming anything more than chronic scepticism when I say that all those prophecies of moon colonies and a new breed of humans up there have sounded to me pretty far-fetched, but then I can even remember when television seemed pretty far-fetched.

I was looking back the other night through some old copies of Punch in the Twenties and came on a drawing of a young woman clutching her dressing-gown around her because her boyfriend, or some male anyway, had suddenly appeared on her telephone screen. Even before we had anticipated regular television programmes as a form of entertainment, we did think that the visual telephone – a telephone with a screen attached would probably come first. Well, it's technically feasible, it exists but it's a rare and absurdly expensive toy.

More to the point of our present scepticism about the future of space technology is a very vivid memory of mine of lying on a beach at the end of Long Island only a few days after the atom bomb fell on Hiroshima and the Japanese had surrendered. Lying alongside me was a neighbour, an old friend who was then a practising patent – or pah-tent – lawyer, specialising in chemical and other scientific discoveries.

We'd just been reading the New York Times which, for the first time, had been allowed to print all the news about the atomic tests in Nevada done a month or more before Hiroshima and accompanying the news was an enormous article by the Times's science correspondent about the history and the process of nuclear power and the achievement of the first bomb.

It may surprise young people to learn that until the Japanese surrender, the vast majority of us, including professional people of all sorts, mathematicians, even physicists, knew very little indeed about what makes a nuclear bomb. We were just learning to parrot E equals MC² as children learn their two times table.

But at my elbow was this knowledgeable lawyer. On the following days, he was very patient in instructing me about the properties of uranium 235 and the whole business of chain reactions and the rest of it. He really knew his stuff and the line I remember most sharply as we decided to go up to lunch was this: 'You know, a year or two from now, five, I should think ten at the most, we'll no longer be using gasoline (petrol) to drive our automobiles. They'll all be nuclear powered.'

Well, what do you know. That was 41 years ago and we're still waiting for our first nuclear motorcar. If you mention this to a physicist, he tends to get defensive and say something like, 'Well, of course, it can be done...' but then he'll admit that at present it would be hideously expensive and, something that had never occurred to us, very dangerous.

And this scene reminds me also of flying along the coast of northern California with the-then governor of the state – this must have been in the early Sixties – and he pointed down to a plant, a small factory on the shoreline of Moro Bay. 'That,' he said, on a note of triumph, 'is our first desalination plant.' De-what? It was there to suck up the waters of the Pacific Ocean and take the salt out of them and then distribute the pure water to any community that needed it. The governor said, 'Once this thing really gets going, there's no limit to the millions of new people coming into California that we can cater for.'

Water has always been the vital need, or vital lack, out West when you wanted to start a town or a village. I believe the plant is still there, but they found that the best desalination process they could invent was also hideously expensive.

There's another scientific report just out. Well, it's not a report, but the text of a hearing held last Tuesday by a subcommittee of the Senate. It's called the Senate sub-committee on environmental pollution. It's been listening to a whole flock of witnesses and it reports that the ozone layer of the upper atmosphere, which protects the earth from the sun's ultraviolet light, is being so rapidly depleted by the gases that we're letting off via industry that we, down here, are getting more and more ultraviolet radiation and, consequently, there will be a dramatic rise in skin cancer.

And a national news magazine this week, surely for the first time in the history of news magazines, devotes its whole cover story to a piece called, 'The Dark Side of the Sun'. It's an exhaustive and a scientific piece on the dangers of sun tanning and announces the arrival in this country of an alarming epidemic of skin cancers. Well that, at least, is something we can do something about.

Incidentally, the fad – and it was a fad – of equating a suntan with health and especially with manliness, didn't exist until the 1920s. The day seems to be near when this country will adopt the prejudice which generations of southerners were born and bred with, the idea that the sun is something you stay out of.

As for the thriving colonies on the moon, my own belief is about as firm as that of Robert Benchley in his comment on reading, that an eye specialist had predicted that our eyes are growing gradually closer together, so that in time, there'll be just one big eye in the middle of our face. Benchley said that the eye specialist thought it might take countless ages, but Benchley was not reassured.

'My eyes,' he said, 'are so close together as they are, that I bet I win. I bet I'm the first one-eyed man in the world!'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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