When President John F. Kennedy announced in 1961 that America would put a man on the moon within ten years, it began a commitment to the future that drove us to create innovation which carried us to great heights and banal depths. And with the last flight of the space shuttle, it’s over. And we have given up.
The monies spent on military operations in foreign lands in the name of jingoism is unavailable for schools or healthcare. The cost of air conditioning tents in Iraq would cover NASA’s budget for a year, but it’s a false comparison since we would never deny the Americans in harm’s way basic comforts. Nor should we. But if this country hadn’t gotten caught up in Cheney-esque compulsion to prove our might in the first place, perhaps things might have gone differently.
No matter, the money spent is gone. The debt remains. The accomplishment dubious at best. Even if it turns out, viewed in retrospect 50 years from now, that our wars around the world served a purpose, other purposes were neglected in the process. Guns and butter, rarely mentioned anymore, can’t be ignored.
But the most significant thing represented by the last shuttle mission is America’s abdication of concern with our future. To the extent something as self-serving as American Exceptionalism exists, it does so because of our drive to find the future, to dream big and achieve our dreams. We have no dreams anymore.
We are consumed by surviving today’s banal existence. We have nothing left in the tank to achieve anything more.
The lovers of technology hold dear to shiny gadgets like the iPad in the belief that they are the future. They are toys, which suck money out of the pockets of those least able to afford toys and give back nothing. Do you really think a great future exists because we can check our emails anywhere, or watch television shows we missed while we were twitting to each other? Yes, it’s a marvel of modern technology, but it won’t give us Mr. Fusion, and if it didn’t work by touching a screen, few Americans would be able to enjoy their shiny new toy as they sit on the couch and get fat.
We have no goals. As a society, we think we’ve accomplished something by putting out a fire, never considering that at best we’re stagnant. At worst, we fool ourselves, as the first isn’t really out but just left smoldering, waiting for someone else to shoulder the burden of putting it out later.
We’re a nation of big shots, every one of us too important to get our hands dirty doing hard work, or suffering personal sacrifice to achieve a future goal. We are easily played by emotional appeals that distract us from hard realities, the ones the require some small amount of thought. We’re a nation of marketers, liars who string together meaningless words and pretend that by making stuff up we can somehow slip past the mess all around us without contributing anything of substance, without actually doing anything that will achieve a needed goal. We can only hope the next guy doesn’t notice that we just got away with a fast one.
The space program was only partially about space, though the vast unknown around us offered the potential to survive the damage we do to our own planet because we’re too lazy to pick up our own garbage, and too enamored of our shiny toys to worry about where to put the nuclear waste. As long as it’s not in our backyard, we just don’t care.
The space program gave us a wealth of opportunity along the way, as scientists and engineers created things that could be used to create more things to solve previously unsolvable problems. There was a time when Mr. Fusion might have been a reality someday, instead of oil from the mideast. You remember oil from the mideast, the stuff we needed to free ourselves from a couple of years ago, until we lost interest and sat back down on the couch to play with our iPad?
There are still people who have the knowledge and interest to create a future out of the mess that swirls around us today, but the death of the space program reflects our nation’s decision to look backward rather than forward. We have been seduced by the shiny toys, and they are good enough to make us forget that we are doing nothing as a society to invest in our future.
Enjoy your iPad 5. There may not be many new toys on the horizon because the drive that brought us this far is gone. We’re too cheap to pay the price of innovation, and we’re too lazy and preoccupied with our transitory self-interest to put in the effort necessary to change. There will be a few tweaks to our shiny toys, which will be touted as wonders and snapped up at exorbitant prices by young people spending their daddy’s money, so that they can sit on their couches and eat Cheetos while surfing youtube.
Is this enough of a future for you? Do you not realize that you’ve bet the farm that some kid in Cambridge or Palo Alto, with no help from you, is going to come up with some truly incredible brainstorm that will create an industry, revitalize America, drive our economy in a direction that we can’t conceive of today?
You better hope that kid is out there, doing what you’re too lazy and self-centered to do. You better hope that he’s been given an adequate education. You better hope he’s not autistic. You better hope he wasn’t killed by a police officer or gang. Or you can just sit on the couch and play with your iPad and pretend that’s good enough for your future.
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strongly disagree. the near future of space exploration is not going to be through manned expeditions. the kepler mission has delivered more discoveries about our universe than the entire shuttle program has in the last 15years of its existence. the messenger program has shown that Mercury is not just a boring hot planet.
the shuttle program was a vanity project. today we need astronauts about as much as we need carriage drivers.
It’s not that the shuttle program, per se, was critical, but that manned space exploration has given us a wealth of technological advances. It’s not even about “knowing” what’s going on up there. It’s about the effort that goes into programs that expand our scientific knowledge, reach and technology. We need astronauts as much as we need a future, not because we can’t send equipment up there without them but because there are bigger issues at stake.
Excellent post. This reminds me of the 70’s when the argument came out…Why are we spending money on the space program when we need to build parks down here. Its a resource question. We don’t build parks with aerospace engineers and all that supports those great minds. We don’t build parks with the tchnology, metals and engineering that gives way to landing on the moon. While the moon is unliveable (as we know it), what about the next universe over? To me it is really the question of utilizing the great resources of this country. Building parks and feeding the homeless are yet another set of resources. The challenge is allocating the funds for each. There are also the big business arguments, let the profit centers of our economy do this, but you see this reasearch, while may be profitable in the far future, it may not be in our lifetimes and there is not one CEO that is going to invest in something he/she cannot take credit for in their own lifetime and rake in their share of profits (i.e. the NEXT generation iPod). The government/tax structure exists to pay for the things that wouldn’t otherwise be done through big business. There is a balance. And if we are to remain leaders on this planet, I agree with you, we must support the resources – the great minds and the adventurers of our society, not add them to the unemployment lines.
oh la la!You think europe is doing better?
we all need a future but we make wrong choices
the US are not the worse
I take no comfort in the problems in Europe, but we need to be responsible for our own choices. We’re not better because Europe has problems too.
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” It seems we have the “no vision” part of the proverb mastered…
The last flight of the space shuttle is not the death of NASA.
The space shuttle has always been an unfortunate diversion from the real task of space exploration. After Apollo, Americans choose to go to low-earth orbit and do the other things, not because they were hard but because they were easy, because that goal served many vested interests. The space shuttle boldly went where we’d been many times before. It is nothing more than a product of pork-barrel politics.
Over the past 30 years or so (that is the lifetime of the space shuttle) virtually all the really exciting and newsworthy events have come from other parts of the space program. The Pioneer and Voyager missions with their outstanding discoveries (and photographs) of Jupiter, Saturn, the other outer planets and their moons. The Hubble space telescope (who can forget the Pillars of Creation?). The Martian rovers. The Galileo Jupiter mission. The Cassini–Huygens mission, including the landing of the Huygens probe on Saturn’s moon Titan. It is these and other missions that explored the solar system, extended our scientific knowledge and posed the difficult engineering challenges. Virtually the only exciting things that came out of the shuttle program were the untethered spacewalks of 1984, and these were discontinued because they were “too dangerous”.
“There are still people who have the knowledge and interest to create a future out of the mess that swirls around us today”. Indeed there are. Burt Rutan comes immediately to mind. Then there is Bill Stone with his remarkable plan for an expedition to the moon with only enough fuel for the trip there – the fuel for the return trip would be extracted from the moon itself.
NASA has been a poor guardian of the dream of human space exploration. That dream will be continued but by private individuals, corporations, and the Chinese. NASA has proved itself unworthy of the task. (NASA has done extremely well with limited budgets on the task of robotic space exploration, and should continue to do this.)
“There may not be many new toys on the horizon because the drive that brought us this far is gone.” I disagree. Of course there are many who are attracted to shiny things like the iPad, but there are still many who are attracted to fundamental scientific, engineering, and technical problems because they are hard.
Like many I look forward to the time when we have human colonies on the moon and Mars. The retirement of the space shuttle has brought that time closer.
I think you’re missing the point, not seeing the forest through the trees. This isn’t about space exploration per se, putting a rover on Mars, but having a grand, expansive vision of the future and all that we’ve acheived wholly apart from the particulars. Everyday life on earth was fundamentally changed by the collateral creations of these visions, even if we never put a man on the moon or created a space station orbitting the planet.
This isn’t about finding microbes on Mars. This is about life here. This is about giving up hope of every inventing Mr. Fusion in the process of great achievements elsewhere. To focus on specific aspects of space exploration is the sort of small view of what we can accomplish. Maybe 10 years from now we will have high resolution images of bacteria from another planet. Is that all we can accomplish? If so, we’re doomed. An iPad and a picture isn’t enough to sustain a future.
But I am often reminded by Dr. Pournelle that “despair is a sin.”
As for NASA and the Shuttle, I fear that, rather than promoting our exploration — and yes, colonization — of space, they have been holding us back. Quoting Dr. Pournelle again, I cite the Iron Law of Bureaucracy — In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. (Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representatives who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent). In all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions. NASA long ago succumbed to the Iron Law, made worse by the meddling of its Congressional paymasters. Sic transit gloria mundi
But that is no the end. In fact, the future of commercial spaceflight is rapidly improving. Remember, it was not NACA (the predecessor of NASA) that developed and ran the first airlines. NACA was created and served as a research organization, not a flight operations organization. The old NASA as space operations company paradigm is simply not working.
Private companies like XCOR, Scaled Composites and Armadillo Aerospace are the future and tend to be led by “true believers” who are in that business because they believe in the end — manned exploration and settlement of space. I would suggest you view Jeff Greason’s keynote speech to the 2011 National Space Society International Space Development Conference.
And don’t give up on fusion just yet. It is still being pursued and much of it by private companies, alone or in collaboration with government.
You are right, Scott, that there is more at stake than just sending up astronauts. Many of us would not be alive today if not for developments that spun off the Space Race and the Shuttle Program. And I think we need a new frontier — The Final Frontier — if the human race is going to not just survive, but thrive.
But it ain’t over ’till its over. Keep the faith and keep pushing for manned exploration and settlement.
Lee
Here are some of the greatest visionaries of all time, these are the kind of people we need to make sure we are looking for and are funded but our pragmatic, short-sighted approach today may exclude them (try getting a research grant from a government agency!!):
Sir Isaac Newton
Aristotle
Albert Einstein
Albert Schweitzer
Leonardo Da Vinci
Jonas Salk
Thomas Alva Edison
Galileo Galilei
Socrates
Bill Gates
Benjamin Franklin
Steven Spielberg
Alexander Graham Bell
Thomas Jefferson
Abraham Lincoln
Pablo Picasso
We need great thinkers and visionaries. If we can’t think bigger, I agree, we are doomed.
I get the wider point. I simply chose to comment on but a specific part of it.
“You better hope he’s not Autistic”
why is that?
Because our educational system finds it easier to pigeonhole autistic children as uneducable rather than provide them with the resources to allow them to develop the skills they have despite the skills they may lack. We squander autistic children, a growing population, and we can’t afford to allow them to be treated like pets or potted plants, unworthy of a real education properly suited to their needs.