38 years ago yesterday, we landed on the Moon. Ever since, the space program -- around the world -- has gone backwards. Almost immediately after Neil Armstrong transmitted, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. Eagle has landed", President Nixon started hacking at NASA's budget. Congress followed suit and that's been the trend and pattern ever since.
The engineering nightmare known as the space shuttle was the result, an under-funded, under-engineered, over-wrought, half-assed manned space vehicle that has never lived up to a single promise. Most stories in the press blame NASA but the real blame lies with the political leadership of the United States. NASA said the shuttle would cost X and Congress told NASA it could have three-fourths of X. NASA cowered and said, "Okay." Congress then gave them one-half X. On and on, asking for more while paying less. NASA's "fault" lay in never saying, "Well, that's not enough to make this thing work."
You can tell just how lousy the shuttle is by looking at its proposed replacement, the Ares (I, IV, and V) launch vehicle and the Orion crew capsule, which looks suspiciously like the very successful Saturn/Apollo combo.
Today the Moon is lost. Bush talks about returning, but there's no fire to the proclamation or the project. No one is trying to grab the public's imagination about space. It's as though the combined efforts of Star Trek and Star Wars were focused on making space boring. For many there's a sense of "been there, done that". Other trot out the old crap about how we must focus our efforts here on the ground before we return our attention to the stars.
Oh my and wow, that's inspirational.
Burt Rutan pegged it 100% when he said that NASA screwed the pooch when it dismissed the "Face on Mars" as a trick of light, shadows, and weather. If they had played it as a mystery to be solved NASA would have had funding for a hundred years.
We need a Delos D. Harriman, The Man Who Sold the Moon (by Robert A. Heinlein). We need that fire, that passion, that desire, and that obsession.
We live on a pale blue dot, floating in the vastness of space and time. Microscopic brains maintain we must focus on the here and now, but the Apollo program was a vision of the future. One that we turned away from.
I watched the US space program evolve as I grew up. It was a natural progression, from simple ballistic shells to the ability to travel to the Moon. It just required an application of national will. It seemed natural that having landed on the Moon we would exploit that knowledge. Something like the now-proposed Ares spacecraft would have been a natural, something larger and more capable than the Saturn.
The old adage is that once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere. The most difficult part of any space mission is getting off the planet, out of our gravity well. If we had continued to explore the Moon we would have had to develop a more permanent presence there. Once that was done, materials from the Moon could have been "dropped" into Earth orbit for building...anything. Much easier to drop from the Moon than lift off Earth.
Again, this would have required vision, dedication, and the will and desire to achieve. Instead, we walked away. Apollo 18 sits on the lawn in Houston, a fully operational Saturn V rocket unused and wasted.
I scan the news in vain to see something commemorating this date in history. Nothing. Ares and Orion are an effort to return us to where we were 38 years ago. Someone should take note. If all goes as planned, we'll have lost 50 years on our quest into space.
If.
I look around, listen to our national leaders, see the trend towards introspection toward no end, with no purpose other than narcissism, and a turning away from exploration, from the thrill of discovery. I am not optimistic.
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