It is possible that our exploration of the moon happened a century too early. We did the right thing, but it was for the wrong reasons, and once the Cold War wound down, the space race quickly became a low priority precicely because science and the economic uses of space were never important goals. -- Wilhelm Tell at #11Well said, WT; the lack of economic planning and development is the main killer to our future space ventures.
Interesting column from Buzz Aldrin, and some added perceptive comments below.
[If you want off or on my Columbia ping list, let me know. FReegards.]
I agree wholeheartedly with the opinion.
When one stops, looks back and tries to find the "watershed" of space exploration, one sees the "beginning of the end" at exactly the same time that the liberals began their insidious process of running the asylum.
The roots of failure were in full play in 1968 and I choose that year as the first year that American Colleges and Universities graduated the "counterculture", as well as the tremendous unrest and basically Anarchy, which was strking all the urban areas. This becomes even more interesting, since I have had the chance to view this as more or less an "outsider" having spent the latter part of the '60s in the military, and we either didn't know what was happening, weren't told, or didn't really connect that this was going to be a problem. I learned the hard way how things were connecting very shortly after getting off a DC8QC at Travis AFB and coming back to "the world".
What I saw was a shock, but I firmly believe that the majority of Americans had become so inured to the conditions, or considered the perps "a bunch of kids", and I do take into account that there were no 24/7 news outlets, no internet, no PC's, and one's entire world view was often shaped by a 30 minute news broadcast on one of the 3 channels ov VHF one could get (UHF, for all practical purposes was PBS), or newspapers. At that time, I think people actually BELIEVED what they read and the edited news they watched. Nobody questioned a thing. Because of this, we have been sliding down the slope for 35 years now, and the snowball is getting HUGE.
I believe we need an active space program, if for no other reason than "it's there". We also need public support and interest such as existed in the early days of Mercury/Gemini and the beginnings of Apollo, before people got bored. The challenge and the frontier are still there, we have seriously slipped in the progress department, we have killed most of the industrial base necessary for a serious program, and we no longer have a clear goal (Man-Moon-Decade) which was kind of the spark plug for the Moon landings, as that whole program was linked inextricably with the cold war.
The above being said, I see a very heavy DOD- related mission for spaceflight, and that is where the funding is going to have to come from, unfortunately, the black budget, as there are too many "Weapons of Mass Distraction" that will keep funding from happening.
Privatization? I don't believe that is viable, unless one wants the next version of our spacecraft to be built across the Mexican border. Since this is the way most of our "industrial" operations are handled today, I see no difference with the space program unless something comes along and kicks America in the butt hard enough to see that the high ground is going to be the deciding factor in any future conflict. If we had pursued exploration of the Moon, and a serious presence in orbit, the answer to 9/11 would have been swift, sure, and sudden, with a double sonic boom, a plasma trail and a huge crater with no nuclear side effects (all this subjectively running backward in time to a witness/survivor LOL), where terrorist strongholds existed. Since I have seen no movement in this direction, I am, at this point, somewhat discouraged.
Keep the Faith for Freedom
Greg