What Happened to the Space Program? And Us?

Within the lifetime of nearly half of all Americans, within the scope of memory of nearly every current political leader of this nation, we once accomplished something beyond all human dreams.  It was awesome, remarkable, and audacious.  It was arguably the greatest scientific feat of all time.  It was the most amazing achievement, representing an unprecedented triumph of the human spirit.  

Nothing in all of history can match it.  Our astounding accomplishment rises above the great adventures of the ages.  Only four decades ago the American people put one of their own on the surface of the Moon.

Since time immemorial, human beings dreamed of flying through the sky, of speeding like lightning high above the face of the Earth, of traveling to other worlds.  Our American nation, collectively, finally made that dream real.

We launched our first satellite in 1958, put our first astronaut in orbit in 1962, and landed a spacecraft on the moon in 1969.  Eleven years from Explorer, a shot-put in orbit, to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin dancing across the face of the Man in the Moon.

The last person on the Moon was Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan in 1972.  There was talk of a space station, talk of a colony on the Moon, talk of a mission to Mars.  Given time and effort, we knew we could do anything.

Having proven ourselves in conquering the distance to the Moon, we stepped back.  The next steps, we said, would require the ability to go easily between the surface of the Earth and Earth orbit.  Although it lacked the excitement of flying to another world, we set about developing the Space Shuttle. 

We were right in creating the Space Shuttle program.  We were on task.  The rationale for development of the Space Shuttle program was valid.  We needed to develop the capability to go to and from orbit quickly and reliably. That capability was a necessary prerequisite to building the Space Station, or the Moon colony, or the trip to Mars.  Everything beyond required it. 

The trouble was, we lost our sense of urgency.  In the absence of a challenging mission, of a  “Space Race,” it seemed that there was no popular mandate to keep up the prolonged effort of space exploration.  Instead of the near-omnipotent agent of universal exploration, we began to think of NASA as a glorified taxi service.  Somewhere along the way we lost sight of the real objective.   

The colony on the Moon retreated to the realm of science fiction as the people of America, and Earth, silently gave up on actually being able to build such an ambitious project.  It would require too much coordination, and cost too much.  

Surface of Mars from Viking

 The Mission to Mars became something we could accomplish with robots instead of astronauts.  It was dangerous, and we had become risk-averse.  We were too fearful to actually go there ourselves.  In fact, even though there remained some brave astronauts willing to accept the risk, we could no longer conceive of permitting anyone else to set forth into the dangerous unknown.  Ironically, we did continue to sending troops into combat with some regularity.  Humans have never been accused of being extremely consistent.

The Space Station did get developed to a point, and continues to exist.  But it has become a small scientific outpost, a sort of orbital bus station for the Space Shuttle rather than the city-in-Earth-orbit we imagined a decade or two earlier.  The Space Station became a support facility for the Shuttle, instead of the other way around.

International Space Station

Instead of an “enabling” capability, the Space Shuttle became an end in itself.  We forgot that we wanted to do more.  We got fearful.  Unlike the 1960s, when we had plenty of problems but got things done anyway, we got distracted.  We lost the faith. 

Some people blame the profiteers of Wall Street for the failure of the American Space Program.  The business community was supposed to take up the cause of space exploration, and they have not.  Businesses exist to create profit and, let’s face it - with the broad range of problems attendant to space flight, the tremendous expense, the risks and the uncertain returns, for now at least, space flight is a poor business venture.  Space exploration, while it has created profits here and there, was and still is an unreliable source of financial return.  The rewards of space flight are real, but they are not primarily monetary. 

Space flight may be motivated by nationalistic effort, by pride-in-accomplishment, by the curiosity that spurs major scientific investigation, by the indefinable impulse of the human spirit to explore.  But, to date at least, we should not reasonably expect that space flight will be motivated by capitalism.

To tell the truth, I’m glad that space flight was undertaken by government rather than business.  As an American citizen who was watched the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions of the 1960s and early 1970s, I feel like a very real participant in the Space Program.  It would not have been the same if the whole thing had been underwritten by IBM or Exxon or Coca-Cola.

Lunar Module in orbit above Moon,
with Earth in the background.

Some people blame the decline of the Space Program on naysayers who ranted every time a rocket lifted off about the waste of money, about how we should feed more poor people instead of spending money to fly into space.  According to these, we have no business building a space program until poverty is eradicated and all of Earth’s problems are solved.  To follow their misplaced idealism to a logical conclusion would mean that we never undertake any new venture until the world has been made perfect.  In other words, never. 

Although we cannot lay the blame for the initial failure of the Space Program on the priority-Earth people, they do bear some responsibility.  Their rhetoric led to a decrease in enthusiasm, a loss of motivation.  Their larger impact has been effectively eradicating space exploration from public consciousness.  By continuing to emphasize scarcity of resources for everything other than their own priorities, they demonize space enthusiasts as elitists who don’t care about poor people.  They have stifled or marginalized the voices of those who would’ve had us out in the Cosmos once more.

[Sidebar:  I support feeding hungry people.  There is no reason we cannot do both.]

Risking the danger of a comment on real-time politics, I will say this.  Perhaps the apex (an ironic term) of the priority-Earth movement was reached as late as 2010.  That was when President Obama redirected NASA, the greatest organization dedicated to exploration in the history of the human race, to become an instrument of political outreach to Islamic cultures.  I cannot even think about this without being stunned and amazed at the utter lack of comprehension and long-term vision this demonstrates.

In the end, we cannot completely blame either the business community, or the priority-Earth people, or even the current administration.  No, the real responsibility for the decline of the American Space program lies with the people themselves.  We got to the Moon, then we got self-satisfied.  We accomplished what we had set out to do, then relaxed and smugly forgot why we had done it in the first place. 

About the time the Apollo landings were coming to a close, a series of unfortunate events pulled our collective attention away from the heavens.  Watergate shook faith in our American government.  The energy crisis of 1973 damaged our self-confidence.  The Vietnam War turned even uglier and we came to grips with the fact that for the first time the United States was losing a war.  We got depressed.  Extreme inflation made it worse.  The Iranian hostage crisis made it worse.  Somewhere along the way we lost our sense of direction, even of purpose.  By the early 1980s we were a mess.

Under the optimistic, can-do environment engendered by President Reagan, we began to believe in ourselves again.  But instead of exploring space we thought of it as a place to counter the missile threat posed by our enemies.  Instead of exploring, we turned our efforts to defeating Communism and making profits. 

Astronaut John Glenn

Space exploration began to be thought of, in the common mentality, as a piece of proud American history.  Important, but past; irrelevant.  Even when we had a rare interlude of widespread peace from 1989 to 1999 (with a brief interruption for the Gulf War in 1991), we did not make a greater effort to expand the space program.  Instead of using the financial savings that came with the end of the “Cold War” (the “peace dividend”) to reinvigorate our exploration of space, we squandered it on this and that until it was no more.

Whether subsequent events cause you to love or hate President George W. Bush, he did come closest of any recent President to reinvigorating NASA and manned flight beyond Earth orbit.  During his campaign in 2000 and in the first months of his presidency, President Bush hinted about a new space program like that of the 1960s, hinted of a challenge to send astronauts to Mars.  But before the initiative was fully developed or formally announced, the attacks of September 11, 2001 changed everything.  In a sense, our return to space was derailed by terrorist attacks and the two wars that followed.  Instead of sending people to Mars, we had to send military forces to Southwest Asia.

Although President Bush’s Mission to Mars might have brought new life to the American Space Program, we cannot blame terrorism for its demise.  We had already allowed space exploration to atrophy.  The terrorist attacks just distracted a leader who was thinking about reinvigorating a program that was already on life-support.  Long before 2001 we had reordered our societal priorities.  As early as the late 1970s we had decided that instead of sending people to live on the Moon, we should apply our collective efforts in technology to improving communication and entertainment.  So today, some three decades later, we have cell phones that can tell you the temperature in Kansas City or Klamath Falls, the phone number of your sister’s ex-boyfriend in Winnipeg, or the scores of this morning’s cricket matches in South Africa.  We can communicate electronically - and incessantly - to people far far away, or a block away.  We can send and receive pictures and music as well as our voices. 

But we can no longer build a rocket that will reach the Moon. 

We have fantastic special effects in our movies and video games.  But we can no longer fly between worlds. 

No matter… even though we cannot “really” do that anymore, our special effects make us feel like we can.  And that’s what matters most, right?  We build great simulators, for training and also for playing.  Gotta love that X-Box.  No one can top the way we pretend.

We went from being masters of the Earth and Sky to being pitiful pretenders.  We care more about the latest “app” for our “cell,” we care more about the newest version of  “Tomb Raider” or  “Mortal Kombat” than we care about accomplishing great things in the REAL world.  The real world requires too much effort.  The real world takes too long.  The real world is tiring for a populace trained to avoid exertion and boring for a populace addicted to the instant gratification of electronic stimulation.

How did we let this happened to US?

The sad little person of 2011 believes that the ability to accomplish is tied to technological resources.  The heroic person of the 1960s knew that achievement is more about the ascendancy of the triumphant human spirit, coupled with dogged determination. 

Today's consumer sits alone in the dark, linked electronically to others just like him, and plays.  With his playmates, he ridicules the shortcomings of a past he judges by the feeble standards of his own limited experience.  He dismisses the potential of a vast nation of capable, courageous and determined pioneers in pursuit of a common goal. 

Perhaps the ultimate insult is the growth of conspiracy theories.  Greater numbers of people than ever before believe the moon landings of 1969 to 1972 were faked.  They just can’t believe that people with less technology than we have today could have performed a feat so far beyond our own ability. 

Too many people today judge the past using the yardstick of their own limited ability, motivation, and accomplishment.  We have fallen so far that many among us not only dismiss the possibility of returning to the Moon… Many are incapable of comprehending that we ever really went there in the first place. 

As the Space Shuttle winds down to its final few flights in the coming months, we stand at a crossroads.  We could allow the last vestige of the glory of manned space flight to disappear from our nation (and at this point, from the planet).  We could let NASA become a fancy high-tech surrogate for the Peace Corps.  Or we could take this opportunity to reestablish the American Space Program as it was, and as it can be again. 

There might be hope.  We were great once, and we can be again.  But it won't happen if we keep playing games.  If we are to approach the heroic stature of our parents and grandparents, we're going to have to put down the electronics, turn off the television, take the earpiece out, turn off the cell phone, and get to work.

We can start by answering some hard questions.  Who are we and what is our role in the world, and in this universe?  What’s the world of our future going to look like?  What are we going to do about it?  Can we exist apart from our home planet?  Can we explore space and still protect Earth?  Can we remain earthbound and still protect Earth?  Are we tough enough to do this?  Are we mentally and emotionally up to the challenge?  Can we match the courage, drive and determination of the first spacefarers of 40 or 50 years ago?

It might be possible.  An advantage we have over the space pioneers of a half-century ago is the benefit of their impressive example.  Do we have enough life and strength and valor to undertake the quest again?   We have a long way to go, even if we do find the courage to try.  It has been 39 years since any human being traveled beyond Earth orbit.

Do we have it within us to be worthy heirs?  

If we are going to return to space, we have to begin finding some answers to those hard questions.  We will begin finding answers by looking within ourselves.  If we look within and find valor and curiosity and a sense of boldness and determination and the seeds of greatness... Then perhaps we will be able to go forth to find many more answers out there somewhere, blowing in the solar wind. 

Gryphem