Free Republic

Competitiveness: The president spent Tax Day reassuring Florida voters that money will keep flowing to NASA. But in space as well as on Earth, we'll be an unexceptional nation. In space, no one can hear you scheme. President Obama's speech at the Kennedy Space Center will never be confused with President Kennedy's clarion call in 1961 to send an American to the moon within a decade. Rather it was an admission that we will now boldly go where no one wants to go.

During World War II in the Pacific, many native tribes were astounded by their first contact with an advanced technological civilization, when the Americans would come in, clear a strip in the jungle, set up a control tower and loud giant silver birds would appear from the sky bearing canned food, trinkets, fuel and other supplies. After the war, the Americans went away for the most part, but the memories remained. Many of the natives, changed forever by the experience, decided to replicate it. They cleared their own strips, built control towers of thatch and palm, and waited for the...

Former U.S. Senator Harrison H. "Jack" Schmitt (R-NM) was the twelfth and last man to set foot on the Moon, as lunar module pilot for Apollo 17 in December 1972. The Administration finally has announced its formal retreat on American Space Policy after a year of morale destroying clouds of uncertainty. The lengthy delay, the abandonment of human exploration, and the wimpy, un-American thrust of the proposed budget indicates that the Administration does not understand, or want to acknowledge, the essential role space plays in the future of the United States and liberty. This continuation of other apologies and retreats...

The eleven scientists, engineers, and physicians chosen in 1967 as NASA’s newest astronauts had just arrived in Houston when Deke Slayton, Director of Flight Crew Operations, called them into a meeting and told them the bad news. The program NASA had envisioned, the program that would have had people living in space stations and studying lunar soil in the 1970s, was over. Project Apollo’s budget was declining, and while American astronauts were still two years away from walking on the moon, the men who would fly Apollo missions had already been selected weeks earlier. The choice Slayton offered the new...

Achievement: The nation that put the first man on the moon may have put its last as budget cuts slash NASA's plans to return. Men will return to the moon, but they will likely speak Chinese. On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy announced in front of a joint session of Congress the dramatic and ambitious goal of sending an American to the moon by the end of that decade. It was a clarion call to the American spirit and technology to rise up and prove that America's best days were still ahead. Forty-one years after Neil Armstrong set foot on...