Why We Can’t Give Up On Space
June 15, 2011
If all goes according to plan, on July 8, 2011, almost 42 years to the day after man first set foot on the moon, NASA will launch its final shuttle mission before permanently retiring the program. After STS-135 returns to Earth, the plan is for American astronauts to hitch rides to the international space station with the Russians for $60-$80 million per seat.
The decision to scrap the shuttle program comes along as part of sweeping spending cuts that will ultimately redefine NASA’s mission as an organization. Where it was once the leader, NASA will become one of many among other international space agencies and private enterprises.
Viewed on its own, this might not seem like a bad thing. After all, NASA is a taxpayer funded organization that has, at times, proven to be wasteful, bureaucratic, and lacking the bold sense of purpose that defined the agency in its early years. Maybe it is time to pass the torch to the private sector.
The problem is this: Private companies alone will never have the scale or the motivation to fund exploration for exploration’s sake–to audaciously push the boundaries of what’s possible not for profit, but for the sake of curiosity.
Why does this matter to you and me? Isn’t space exploration a colossal waste of our tax dollars given all of the other needs and economic realities here at home?
The answer is that space exploration is worth it, and it has already had more of an impact on many of the technologies and modern conveniences that we take for granted than we will ever know. This is not the time to give up. It’s time to reorganize, refocus, and recapture the spirit that pushed mankind to achieve incredible feats the like of which have not been equaled in many of our lifetimes.
Why?
Space Exploration is Inspiration
On September 12, 1962, before a crowd at Rice University in Texas, President Kennedy declared his intention to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. I have mentioned audacity in this post, but no speech better defines the word than the President’s when you consider the facts.
Little more than a year before the Rice University speech, Yuri Gargarin, a Russian cosmonaut, became the first human being in space. Humanity had scarcely figured out how to escape Earth’s atmosphere and return a passenger alive when our President declared our commitment to create a vehicle capable of leaving Earth’s orbit, carrying a human crew hundreds of thousands of miles through space, landing in an unknown place, and retuning safely.
When Kennedy set this goal, not one person had any idea how we would possibly make it happen, but failure was not an option. The world’s best and brightest came together, dreamed bigger than anyone has dreamed before or since, and on July 20, 1969 Americans and people all over the world gathered around their TVs and watched in awe as Neil Armstrong climbed out of a tiny spacecraft and stepped on to the surface of the moon.
The space race inspired Americans, created a groundswell of national pride, created thousands of new jobs and new industries in a way that had previously been achievable only through war. Make no mistake, the space race was part of the Cold War, but it also is one of the big reasons that this war ended without a shot.
Space Exploration Breeds Innovation
There have been dozens of articles, books, and scholarly papers dedicated to this subject, so there is no reason to go in to great depth here.
The bottom line is this: We had no idea how to get to the moon, so the only solution was to dream the way and make it a reality as quickly as possible.
Thanks to the incredible challenges posed by the moon mission, technology that may have taken decades to develop and implement was brought to life instead in the span of just a few years. The discoveries were then passed on to private enterprise, and we benefit today in almost every facet of our lives.
Do you use cell phones or computers? Do you benefit from modern medicine or safe air travel? Thank the space program. The list could go on and on, but the point is to abandon space exploration is to abandon progress.
In many ways, we already have. We haven’t returned to the moon since 1972. The shuttle program was incredible in its own right, but now we have chosen to walk away from that too.
Imagine what the world might be like today had our leaders followed in Kennedy’s steps and continued challenge our best minds to push the boundaries of what was possible farther and faster.
We can’t give up on space, but it’s also clear that we can’t move forward with NASA as it stands today. We need leaders that believe in the power of human curiosity and ones with the vision to harness that energy and push forward to inspire a new generation of dreamers.
