“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962
It’s been nearly 50 years since those words of poetry and exploration were spoken. Less than seven years after that speech, the US put Americans on the moon and returned on five subsequent missions. The Apollo program was soberly conducted, and risks were considered, but our race to the moon was not without danger. Astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee died in a capsule fire during ground testing. Another crew of three, the men of Apollo 13, only made it back to earth because they and their ground controllers were able to improvise repairs to their stricken craft. Yet, still our countrymen persevered, literally going where no man had gone before.
Apollo ended in the early 70s, and we pressed on with the Shuttle program. The Space Shuttle was sold to the American public, not with romantic visions of humans launching on expeditions into the unknown, but with the practicalities of a re-usable vehicle built to carry cargoes into low earth orbit. There were promises, though, that the Shuttle would be a stepping stone to far greater adventures. The Shuttle would establish a permanent manned presence away from the gravity of earth, from which ambitious manned expeditions into the unknown could originate more easily.
These promises faded gradually over the next thirty years. While the Shuttle did a few things for which a manned presence was probably essential, like repairing the Hubble Telescope, the human presence on most missions seemed to give an incremental advantage at best. Most importantly, mankind was venturing nowhere new, just trudging up an increasingly well-worn path to low earth orbit. The International Space Station came along, with increasing cooperation among nations and new longevity records for humans in earth orbit, but the science and exploration, the pushing out of the boundaries of human existence, lagged. After the moonshots, there were no more pushes into the unknown. NASA, born as an agency that figured out how to manage risks, now became an agency that avoided risk. After the Columbia tragedy especially, Space Shuttle missions seemed predominantly concerned with the safe return of the vessels to earth, with many days of two-week missions spent not in doing science but in ensuring no launch damage endangered re-entry.
But this “maturation” of manned space flight from explorers pushing into the unknown to a retrenchment to lower cost, lower return missions was not done in a vacuum. It was done in the context of America becoming a mature power, content to rely largely on past triumphs to keep its reputation and influence intact. Centuries ago, Imperial Rome reached a point of its greatest extent. It no longer sought to expand, but instead focused on maintaining a status quo, putting its legions on the defensive, over a long twilight. Similarly, the people of the United States have matured from restless pioneers following the sun west into new lands, bound together by a spirit of self-determination, to a people with little overarching national identity, seeking to maintain a share of an ever-dwindling pie. We conquered the western lands of our continent and when threatened by external forces, launched our armed forces across the globe. But then we retrenched, slowly losing our national identity.
Many would say we have enough problems here without worrying about manned space exploration – the energy challenge, international terrorism, and a mounting national debt, to name a few. But this misses the point. . It is tempting in a time of seemingly uncontrollable debt and uncertain national unity to paste a stamp of frivolity on space exploration. But this is wrong – this is acceptance that America has seen her best days already, that her best path is to hold onto what she has, to carefully husband her remaining coins, to wait to die. Our pioneering ancestors faced down problems that would make most modern day Americans quiver with fear, yet still they pressed on. They conquered a continent while Civil War raged. They came out of a Great Depression to defeat enemies on fronts covering the planet. They sent men to the moon while their countrymen chose self over service. Perhaps America’s time in the sun is fading – no great world power has remained at the forefront of world influence indefinitely. Then again, perhaps there is still opportunity to rekindle this national spirit that tamed many past challenges. There is no challenge which fits into this mold than that of manned exploration of space. There is still time for us to chart a course into the unknown, to once again push out the boundaries of American civilization. But we must act
