Posted on 07/08/2011 6:30:03 AM PDT by shortstop
My little boy wants to be an astronaut.
Or a beekeeper.
He wants to go to space, but he likes honey, so, in the summer between kindergarten and the first-grade, he’s facing a dilemma.
Realistically, of course, he will never be an astronaut.
He wasn’t born in Russia or China.
And for the foreseeable future, that’s where all the spacefarers will come from. As of today, America is out of the space business.
We don’t make the Right Stuff anymore.
I was born in 1959, and America landed on the moon for my 10th birthday. For all of my life, Americans have kicked the tires and lit the fires and roared into space. The wild blue yonder was ours, and the long tradition of human exploration was ours to uphold.
That ends today as the shuttle lifts off under its own power one last time. After 30 years of same-o same-o low-earth orbit, it’s time to park it in the barn. Our sights, which were once set on the stars, now do not leave the tarmac.
America is grounded.
Oh, sure, there’s the International Space Station, an essentially pointless plumbing problem circling the planet somewhere in the out-of-here sphere. It’s the kiddie ride of space travel, and if we want to get there from now on, we’ll have to go as cargo on a Russian bottle rocket.
JFK must be proud.
In a generation, we have gone from defining the science, from being a leap or two ahead of the cutting edge, to being also rans. We have surrendered glory like no one in history. We have begged for second-class status and it is ours.
So, no, son, you can’t be an astronaut.
And, no, son, you can’t go to Florida and watch a rocket launch.
Rather, someday, as you are in the prime of your life, the last American astronaut – like the veteran of a long-forgotten war – will die.
And with him he will take that spark of wanderlust that populated the islands of the oceans and brought Columbus to the New World.
Once we studied Prince Henry the Navigator and Hudson and Drake, and others who saw the horizon and sailed for it. We held up and honored those who filled in the empty spaces on the map. We once believed it noble to “boldly go where no man had gone before.”
But that ethic has grown cold in this country. Bureaucracy and sloth killed it. First it was the ossification of NASA into the dead weight of a government workforce, then it was the social lust for entitlement over adventure. We cared less about advancing the race and more about lining our pockets. Government cheese became more important to us than national glory.
And by the time the shuttle gets 100 miles down range, the fire will be out.
So, no, son, you can’t be an astronaut.
And, no, America, you can’t claim the skies.
Wilbur and Orville clawed man free of gravity’s hold, and Barack Obama has dropped the baton.
Because ultimately it is political will that drives exploration. Ferdinand and Isabella were not interested in specimens of flora and fauna, Jefferson wanted Lewis and Clark to nail down a true claim to the Louisiana Purchase, John Kennedy wanted to stick it to the Soviets.
And Barack Obama wants to stay at home.
He is not alone in that. He is merely reflecting and empowering a constituency. In the days of Apollo the argument was that space drained important money away from the War on Poverty. Today each launch is counted as a drain on money that would otherwise go to non-profits or public assistance.
For some, the desire to know, to go and do, has grown cold and dead. And they, these days, are making the rules.
And so what is perhaps the greatest technological achievement of history is mothballed and forgotten, days of glory folded into boxes stowed away in attics. The generation that remembers will pass away and the generation that doesn’t care will rise.
We will find adventure in a videogame, and leave space to the Chinese and the Russians.
Who will go where we won’t, and do what we won’t, while we corpulently rot from within.
It’s like “Star Trek” meets “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
And, no, son, you can’t be an astronaut.
In the late 60s, 70s, and 80s, the “Space Race” was a powerful economic driving force.
Large swathes of our technological advances are due to the applied research from the Space program.
Today, NASA is in the shadow of its former technological and scientific apex.
Yeah they ratified it. The more restrictive Moon Treaty wasn’t ratified but is pretty much globally accepted.
Oh please. This sounds suspiciously like those pro-government whines when they talk about cutting funding for the arts...as if no art will ever be created again, if not for a grant by the government.
We do have a vested national security interest in the exploration of space. Did it ever occur to this author however, that it might not be so efficient to always require an actual astronaut in space to explore it? We do have the ability to launch unmanned rockets and space vehicles...and we don't even need the government to do it, at least not to fund it.
I know plenty of young boys who wanted to be rock stars, but for whatever reason, they couldn't. They choose other professions, are just as happy, and life goes on.
Whatever unity we once had as a nation vis-a-vis the space program and subsequent moon landing are long past. We were pioneers, and in under the guise of science, other nations benefitted. Yes, like many other things including advanced medicine and healthcare, they did it on the backs of the US taxpayer.
That's beside my point. What I was trying to say is that we must re-consider EVERY expenditure our country currently makes because we are out of money. There can't be any sacred cows, including (what I would consider a very successful) space programs such as NASA.
Correction for the author: Son, you CAN be an astronaut but you have to learn Russian or Mandarin first.
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