America In Space - A Commentary

This past week was marked by the shuttle Enterprise making her final flight, piggy backed on a modified 747 aircraft and heading to her final home at the Intrepid Museum in New York

This coming week will mark the fifty-first anniversary of the day Alan Shepard became the first American in space, becoming a ballistic missile on board Freedom 7.

The bookends of these two historical events saw the American space program land a man on the moon, begin the first serious study of our solar system and begin the inevitable march to the vast realm of space beyond our planet and our solar system.

Collectively as a nation, we shared the exhilaration as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin fulfilled the dreams of millennia by landing on the moon on the Apollo 11 mission, while Michael Collins flew the command craft solo  around the dark side of the moon, being as alone as any human in history.

Collectively, we shared the heartbreak of the fire in Apollo 1 that killed astronauts Grissom, White & Chaffee. We grieved as one at the Challenger and Columbia disasters.

Together we marveled at the most successful disaster that was Apollo 13, the mission that gave legend to Gene Kranz’s’ almost anthemic statement that ‘failure is not an option’. Close examination of Mission Control photos and film during those several heart-stopping days shows not aged space veterans, but our young best and brightest drawing upon their education and training as they created solutions for situations none had ever contemplated.

In many ways, the space program gave America more ‘bang for the buck’ than any other government program. This blog is being written on a computer that has more computing power than Apollo 11. The technological advances that came out of our space program are too numerous to list here.

For all the positives that NASA as an entity has given to America, its detractors seem to have a single response, used almost as an epithet: “the money spent in space could be better spent here at home solving problems for the average American.”

The level of ignorance of such a position demands some manner of a response.

This nation spends more education dollars per student than any other industrialized nation on the planet, yet not only are the results lacking, the critical math and science scores needed for the future are woefully lacking with competing nations.

The war on poverty started almost fifty years ago has done little to help Americans, save for creating a welfare class that remains mired in poverty.

We are in need of scientific solutions for our future energy needs. Consider that the Apollo missions carried no conventional fuel to provide power for the voyages, but rather used fuel cell technology. A thriving space program would need to address long term power needs for the exploration of Mars, for example. That technology, when developed, would be able to be modified for use back here at home. The collateral advantages of the space program were unknown when it was created over fifty years ago, but the advantages are now taken as commonplace and not given their proper due as being a result of our quest to explore the heavens.

In an era when money is squandered in so many ways, there must be a national demand to fund a REAL space program, and not one dependent upon hitching rides from nations who do not have our national interest at heart.

To quote President John F. Kennedy – “we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard”.

Failure to reignite our space program is not, must not, and cannot be an option.