We Choose Not To Go To The Moon...or anywhere else

Last week, on tax day, President Obama went to Cape Canaveral and issued some proclamations about America's leadership in space and how committed he was to NASA blah, blah, blah.  Don't listen to the teleprompter, listen to the advice of some men who know: Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Gene Cernan and James Lovell.  These three heroes penned an open letter to Mr. Obama about his disastrous plan.  (Read the full text here.) Now the backdrop to all this is the fact that come September of this year, we will be retiring the space shuttle.  We will have no way to put Americans in space...period.  We will rely on the Russians to get personnel to the Space Station and back.  Ironic too that the nation that challenged us with Sputnik, will now provide our taxi service.  This is more than a tragedy, it is an embarrassment. 

Mind you, this is not Obama's fault.  This has been coming down the pike for a long time and both Bush and Clinton avoided dealing with the inevitable.  But the one program that was on track to at least put us back into space was the Constellation rocket system and now it has been defunded.  We have spent over $10 billion on the project and now we will have zip.  As the former Apollo astronauts put it:

For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.  While the President's plan envisages humans traveling away from Earth and perhaps toward Mars at some time in the future, the lack of developed rockets and spacecraft will assure that ability will not be available for many years.

Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity.  America must decide if it wishes to remain a leader in space. 

This is not only a matter of national character, which Obama truly despises, it is also about future safety. Let's be real, future wars will be fought in space whether we like it or not.  Our current methodology of combat relies very heavily on space based surveillance, command and control.  With no capability to fly to immediate Earth orbit, what chance do we have that those sensors will be rendered useless with no ability to replace and replenish?  Do you think the Russians will be eager to allow us to borrow a Soyuz or two to fix our spy satellites?

Readers of these pages know how hawkish I am on Federal spending, but the space program is exactly the kind of thing the government should be involved in: it's too big for private enterprise, it's essential for safety and it defines a nation.  We will never be able to quantify the number of kids that were inspired to become engineers and scientists because of the Apollo missions, but it ain't small.  I was at a dinner with seven alumni from my undergraduate institution (we were plotting our 30th reunion).  Of the group, there was a lawyer, a doctor, two business types, and three engineers.  I posed the question to my gear head friends about inspirations in their lives to go through the nightmare of engineering school and all three said "Apollo" somewhere in their answer. (I might add, one is actually working for NASA...you guessed it, a real rocket scientist!) 

There is also a two-pronged multiplier to space exploration: technologies and people.  Technological advances are pretty obvious - hell, the Apollo folks had a hydrogen powered vehicle forty years ago.  The people part might not be so obvious.  Projects of this nature increase the interest in technology, increase the education of technology and end up attracting the "best and brightest" from around the world who want to be part of the great adventure.  The terrifying reality is that without a vibrant space program, that talent will migrate to Moscow, Beijing or who knows...Pyongyang or Tehran?

But back to this issue of character and the loathing hatred Obama and his ilk have for the American spirit.  I remember watching the moon landing in my grandfather's office and the incredible sense of pride I had in being an American.  It seemed perfectly natural to me that we were the ones doing this - Americans do things with bold brush strokes.  We are not just another country, our national character calls us to lead the world, but folks in this administration are embarrassed by that and seem to want to end this.  Their perception is that our leadership is a force for bad - you know, the standard pablum about "oppression," "racism," "imperialism." They do not believe in American exceptionalism, nay, they loath it and seem hell bent on ensuring it's fading away.  They believe they are in power to manage America's decline and this move on our space dominance is just one more sad confirmation.

The Death of NASA

Tom Wolfe has a superlative column over at the Sunday NY Times (yes, the Grey Lady actually prints something worthwhile every now and again), titled "One Giant Leap to Nowhere." He makes the compelling case that the American space program began it's long descent the moment that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon:

NASA’s annual budget sank like a stone from $5 billion in the mid-1960s to $3 billion in the mid-1970s. It was at this point that NASA’s lack of a philosopher corps became a real problem. The fact was, NASA had only one philosopher, Wernher von Braun. Toward the end of his life, von Braun knew he was dying of cancer and became very contemplative. I happened to hear him speak at a dinner in his honor in San Francisco. He raised the question of what the space program was really all about.

It’s been a long time, but I remember him saying something like this: Here on Earth we live on a planet that is in orbit around the Sun. The Sun itself is a star that is on fire and will someday burn up, leaving our solar system uninhabitable. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of.

Unfortunately, NASA couldn’t present as its spokesman and great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht with a heavy German accent.

As a result, the space program has been killing time for 40 years with a series of orbital projects ... Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission, the International Space Station and the space shuttle. These programs have required a courage and engineering brilliance comparable to the manned programs that preceded them. But their purpose has been mainly to keep the lights on at the Kennedy Space Center and Houston’s Johnson Space Center — by removing manned flight from the heavens and bringing it very much down to earth. The shuttle program, for example, was actually supposed to appeal to the public by offering orbital tourist rides, only to end in the Challenger disaster, in which the first such passenger, Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher, perished.

Wolfe is right. We are missing that "vision thing," that once unified a nation. He makes the compelling, and I think accurate, argument that the whole Apollo program was a case of "single combat..." we had to beat the Soviets to the moon!

Perhaps it is time for a new vision, as Wolfe suggests:

For 40 years, everybody at NASA has known that the only logical next step is a manned Mars mission, and every overture has been entertained only briefly by presidents and the Congress. They have so many more luscious and appealing projects that could make better use of the close to $10 billion annually the Mars program would require. There is another overture even at this moment, and it does not stand a chance in the teeth of Depression II.

It disturbs the eco-freaks and statists to no end when you say that man has a "destiny," beyond the Earth. We are supposed to be insignificant little squeeks undeserving of anything more than the next snail or ant...just another life form, only mildly more sentient. Obviously, I disagree. In the famous words of Buzz Lightyear - "to the Universe and beyond!"