Posted on 01/16/2004 12:42:02 PM PST by brazucausa
From the January 31, 2000 issue: America has been lost in space. It's time to find our nerve again.
If you were to say to a physicist in 1899 that in 1999, a hundred years later . . . bombs of unimaginable power would threaten the species; . . . that millions of people would take to the air every hour in aircraft capable of taking off and landing without human touch; . . . that humankind would travel to the moon, and then lose interest . . . the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad.
--Michael Crichton
I WHAT MANNER OF CREATURE ARE WE? It took 100,000 years for humans to get inches off the ground. Then, astonishingly, it took only 66 to get from Kitty Hawk to the moon. And then, still more astonishingly, we lost interest, spending the remaining 30 years of the 20th century going around in circles in low earth orbit, i.e., going nowhere.
Last July, the unmanned Lunar Prospector probe was sent to find out whether the moon contains water. It was a remarkable venture, but even more remarkable was the fact that Prospector was the first NASA spacecraft, manned or unmanned, to land on the moon since the last Apollo astronaut departed in 1972. Twenty-seven years without even a glance back.
We remember the late 15th and 16th centuries as the Age of Exploration. The second half of the 20th was at one point known as the Space Age. What happened? For the first 20 years we saw space as a testing ground, an arena for splendid, strenuous exertion. We were in race with the Soviets for space supremacy, and mobilized for it as for war. President Kennedy committed all of our resources: men, materiel, money, and spirit. And he was bold. When he promised to land a man on the moon before the decade was out, there were only eight and a half years left. At the time, no American had even orbited the earth.
The Apollo program was a triumph. But the public quickly grew bored. The interview with the moon-bound astronauts aboard Apollo 13 was not even broadcast, for lack of an audience. It was only when the flight turned into a harrowing drama of survival that an audience assembled. By Apollo 17, it was all over. The final three moonshots were canceled for lack of interest.
Looking to reinvent itself, NASA came up with the idea of a space shuttle ferrying men and machines between earth and an orbiting space station. It was a fine idea except for one thing: There was no space station. Skylab had been launched in May 1973, then manned for 171 days. But no effort was made to keep its orbit from decaying. It fell to earth and burned. We were left with an enormously expensive shuttle--to nowhere.
The shuttle has had its successes--the views of earth it brought back, the repairs to the Hubble space telescope it enabled. But it has been a dead end scientifically and deadening spiritually. There is today a palpable ennui with space. When did we last get excited? When a 77-year-old man climbed into the shuttle in November 1998 for a return flight. That was the most excitement the shuttle program had engendered in years--the first time in a long time that a launch and the preparations and even the preflight press conference had received live coverage. Televisions were hauled into classrooms so kids could watch.
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
In 1991, the Stafford Commission recommended the establishment of permanent human outposts on the moon and on Mars by the early decades of this century. Rather than frittering away billions on the space station, we should be going right now to the moon--where we've been, where we know how to go, and where we might very well discover life-sustaining materials. And from there, on to the planets.
In the end, we will surely go. But how long will it take? Five hundred years from now--a time as distant from us as is Columbus--a party of settlers on excursion to Mars's South Pole will stumble across some strange wreckage, just as today we stumble across the wreckage of long-forgotten ships caught in Arctic ice. They'll wonder what manner of creature it was that sent it. What will we have told them? That after millennia of gazing at the heavens, we took one step into the void, then turned and, for the longest time, retreated to home and hearth? Or that we retained our nerve and hunger for horizons, and embraced our destiny?
You're speaking of the existing shuttle. Don't blame many of the dreamers/scientists in NASA. Blame politicians and our military leaders. Originally, the scientists planned lighter smaller more efficient shuttles capable of reaching high outer orbit, as well as different space stations in outer orbits. We could have had hundreds of operational shuttles in place of the few we have now. At a much cheaper cost.
But then others intervened, and the shuttle project got bloated and immensely complicated. The military wanted the shuttle to look Earth-ward, and to be able to carry military payloads. They didn't care about attaining a high outer orbit.
Even the Soviets had similar problems with their military hijacking space programs for their own use. They eventually did design and build a lighter smaller shuttle (based on our designs) and started testing it within the last 5 years but they ran out of money and abandoned it.
Our best hope is for us to have leaders who support exploration of the Cosmos. Unfortunately, they're all mired in satisfying those who line their pockets, or only looking at issues that affect us in the short-term.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.