Expanding the human experience

This week, the White House announced President Bush will make a policy
decision about the space program and NASA’s goals for the next several
decades. Hints of what the President is going to propose include a
return to the moon and settlement upon its surface. A manned Mars
orbital mission is to follow, probably in light of the success of the
landing of the robotic probe, “Spirit”. All this will no doubt invoke
condemnations from some members of Congress and possibly some
Presidential candidates. Money, they will argue, should be spent on the
homeless and needy rather than to finance space exploration. Critics
will not highlight the billions of dollars spent on welfare programs in
the past four decades, making only a slight dent on poverty in America.
None of these arguments will highlight the myriad ways in which the
space program has improved surgical appliances, miniaturization of
computers, and the materials upon which our eggs are cooked and
automobiles built.

As a teacher, I believe the Apollo program of the 1960’s gave us
something less tangible but equally valuable. Aside from the “We’re
behind the Russians!” anxiety which changed the manner in which science
and math was taught, it gave students a place to look forward to. The
moon became a place people could go. Students had an opportunity to
really change the course of the human experience. You might look back
at Earth someday, and say “I came from there and the rest is open to
exploration”.

Clearly, I am in favor of a bold space program.

And there was human commitment. I grew up just a few miles from the
Bethpage, Long Island, plant of Grumman Aerospace. In 1970, I was a
college sophomore, dating a girl whose father had been a thermal
engineer working on the lunar module. Neil and Buzz had stepped on the
moon and suddenly, he was unemployed. Production of future LEMs was
cancelled; “thank you very much.” Colleagues of his were vending
frankfurters and hot chestnuts on New York streets while he took the
postal examination, trying to secure some kind of employment. It was
fallout of the end of America’s lunar vision. Who needed the moon? Who
needed that idealism? Americans were choking on the failing war in Viet
Nam, a failing war on poverty, a failing political system. As far as
space was concerned, we quit the moon while we were ahead. Remaining
Saturn rockets became parts of a one shot Skylab program. Two were
stuffed and mounted as lawn ornaments in Florida and Texas; one became a
road marker at an Alabama intersection. Unused lunar modules were sent
to museums, cut up, and one was even buried at a landfill. The
machinery developed to build these vehicles was broken up and sold as
scrap. Plans were microfiched and scattered to libraries, while others
were simply dumped into the garbage. Technology to go to another world
was developed, slightly used, and thrown away.

The moon has been visited only six times in all human history. Should
we go back to the moon in the 21st Century? We certainly won’t go back
the way we went in the 20th. Today, Boeing and Lockheed have swallowed
the two prime contractors of Apollo, North American and Grumman. The
giant Saturn V’s will not return. The space shuttle is incapable of
breaking out of Earth orbit. New spacecraft will be built of
lightweight metal and carbon fiber. Navigation equipment will be
smaller and far more powerful than imagined in 1969. A new launch
vehicle will have to be imagined, configured, drawn as plans,
constructed, test flown and refined. John F. Kennedy’s decade deadline
will not exist.

We have the historical legacy to know how moon ships were assembled, and
we will go forward from that base. Astronauts will line up for lunar
mission training and hundreds of young engineers, this time of both
genders and all races, will have the opportunity to show their vision
and talents. There will be fantastic new discoveries in materials,
technologies and techniques, all of which will filter into our homes and
daily lives, just as they did over the last four decades. There will be
excitement as the progressive development takes place. Expenditures
will be great, but so will the rewards. Venturing into space is in
reality, about the quality of life on Earth.

None of this comes cheaply. Space vehicles are incredibly complex
systems. The further we venture into the unknown, the more complex and
expensive the systems become. The United States has both the vision and
economy needed to support such development. As for human commitment, we
had better decide we will not retreat as we reach into the future.
Space exploration is something humans have to do. It is a destiny we
cannot, nor should we try to, shirk. The past histories of projects
Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo have shown us to be capable of great
accomplishments in fantastic voyages. As a people, we have an
opportunity to renew that legacy. The real question is how badly do we
want to carry humankind along that path?