The View From Mudsock Heights: We All Shall Witness the End of the American Space Program

In mid-April the President of the United States announced his “space program.” It purports to move us toward sending human beings to Mars in a quarter century or so. It won’t do this. Instead, it merely the throws enough money at NASA and space contractors to keep their respective congressional districts happy. It’s a small amount by this administration’s standards of spending. It won’t take us to Mars or anywhere else.

When John F. Kennedy announced on May 25, 1961, his bold plan “of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the earth,” he was careful to say that it was to be done “before this decade is out.” Kennedy actually wanted it to happen.

He knew Washington. In 1961, he had every reason to think he would remain president until January 20, 1969. The program would take place almost entirely during his administration.

So we did go to the Moon. Though Kennedy did not complete even his first term, the circumstances of his death were such that it the Moon shots became a kind of memorial to him — and his vice president remained in office through the remainder of what likely would have been Kennedy’s two terms.

Richard Nixon, who disliked anything that reminded people of Kennedy and who was hardly a technological visionary, killed the Moon program as quickly as he could. The equipment that had been built for now-canceled Moon shots was employed in silly projects such as “Apollo-Soyuz,” in which an American space ship docked with a Soviet one and an astronaut and a cosmonaut shook hands, then came home.

NASA’s best minds were laid off. For a time it looked as if the manned space program was dead — and, in fact, for nearly a decade it was dead. Nixon gave grudging approval to some kind of space shuttle project which, by the time he agreed to it, had been whittled down considerably. A succession of presidents and congresses pared it further. When the space shuttle finally got launched in 1981 we had a manned space program again, but it was limited to low-Earth orbit and wasn’t good for much.

This was followed by the equally useless International Space Station. Neither the shuttle nor the space station has produced the promised scientific breakthroughs, nor could they in low-Earth orbit. It has been as if Columbus, having been to America, now limited himself to pleasure cruises along the European coast. And for the first time, the space program failed to pay for itself in the kind of technical developments that made life on Earth better. The progress in materials, semiconductors, and the like that flowed from the Moon program created whole new industries.

The misbegotten shuttle will be grounded soon and we’ll be paying the Russians to fly our astronauts to our own space station. We will have no way to put anyone in space ourselves.

In January 2004, President Bush proposed a modest space program — based on substantial study by people who know about space exploration, not politicians — that would first take us to the Moon and only then on to Mars. I had broken the story of the plan a month earlier and had appeared on the Today show to talk about it. The lone problem I saw was that it relied on subsequent presidents and congresses to continue to pay for it. There’s very little money involved by government standards, but it’s an easy shot for political demagogues who want money for something else. Alas, I was right.

We will not and cannot go to Mars without going to the Moon first. We certainly won’t and can’t if we start from a position of being unable to send anyone anywhere.

Going to the Moon and staying there, as Bush proposed in 2004, is a useful thing. It requires development of technologies useful here on Earth and does it in a very focused way. The benefits in, for instance, extremely efficient use of energy, are vast.

We would also learn a great deal. The Moon is a perfect platform for a space telescope. It allows low-gravity research in ways that no other place does. The scientific and technological benefits would be vast.

The argument is always made that going to the Moon saps money from other things that could be done. First, everything saps money from other things that could be done. Second, it’s not a zero-sum game. A truly innovative space program, as Apollo was, more than pays for itself in technical and industrial offshoots. We’ll get none of that from the president’s sorry proposal.

There’s something more, something which Kennedy knew was important: that we become and continue to be a spacefaring nation. We haven’t really been that since Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt took off from the Moon in December 1972.

It has been argued that the president is seeking the diminution of American influence, in making certain that our best days are behind us. And it’s easy to poo-pooh that as hyperbole from the political opposition.

But then something like his space program comes along, and I have to wonder.

Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.