Does anyone remember when the United States cared about space?
I was fortunate enough to grow up during those heady days of "landing a man on the moon” back in July 1969. Astronaut Neil Armstrong’s stirring words of, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” as he stepped off the lunar lander onto the moon’s surface gave us earthbound observers a thrill.
And a huge amount of pride, as I recall.
It was an amazing time. When President Kennedy declared in 1962 that America would do such a thing by the end of the 1960s – and we did – it set off an amazing journey.
It was the beginning of lunar exploration, the creation of the International Space Station and the Shuttle voyages that continued to inspire us. Kids wanted to grow up to be astronauts, and the endeavor attracted the best and brightest among us.
But it would not last.
Down here on Earth, the U.S. was coming apart over the Vietnam War, civil rights struggles, and growing social division. It didn’t help when two Shuttle disasters occurred in 1986 and 2003, killing their courageous crews.
Over the years, Americans began to lose interest in space. It was tremendously costly – hundreds of billions that could have been spent to make people’s lives better on Earth.
And it could be deadly. The loss in 1986 of Christa McAuliffe, a sweet teacher who was going into space to inspire kids around the world and who seemed to be the new face of our space program, was particularly devastating.
Oh, the nation’s space exploration effort has soldiered on with the Mars program, which has landed some remote-controlled rovers on the planet and taken some kinda interesting photos of its desolate landscape.
But where were the Martians we hoped to meet? I mean, all of those movies we watched that portrayed them as superior beings living in luxurious Martian cities – they weren’t true?
No, they weren’t.
Gradually, Americans lost the zeal that accompanied that incredible first moon landing. By the time we saw astronauts cavorting across the moon’s nothing-landscape in their lunar dune buggy – with no apparent mineral resources to make an ongoing enterprise profitable – the thrill was gone.
Plans for a moon-based space lab fell by the wayside. Too much money, too risky – and for what?
Now I hear that – 55 years later – China is planning to land astronauts on the moon by 2030.
Wow – only 60 years after we did -- if they can.
Remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, the whole U.S. space exploration story has become rather sad. Young Americans have become too distracted by their smartphones and social media to look up at the stars and care about what may be up there.
Remember 2001: A Space Odyssey, that cool movie about the computer killing all but one of the human explorers? That film came out in 1968 – the year before the moon landing – and predicted a world in 2001 that never happened.
Because our journey into the heavens has apparently flamed out. Looks like it might be up to the Chinese to re-ignite that adventure.
If they can.
While I can understand the idea of keeping Earth money on Earth to help the poor, the sad fact is that there's already billions of dollars available on Earth that could be used for that very help...but those in charge of the moolah prefer to use it to build obscenely huge homes, fund sports arenas and teams, fund auto racing, fund golf courses and, in Iowa, fund private school tuition for wealthy kids whose parents could easily afford that tuition, starving public schools by giving that money to those private schools...Icould go on and on. We are soooooo shortsighted in our neglect of the space program, because eventually humans will need a new home, especially in light of the million…