40 miles closer to heaven
Mike Marchand
It took the space shuttle Columbia becoming a shooting star in the Texas sky to make space travel seem as extraordinary as it was so long ago.
The Soviet Union's launch of the bowling-ball-on-a-tripod called Sputnik shocked the world, but mostly because the U.S.S.R. had momentarily surpassed the U.S. technologically. But on May 25, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy boldly announced that America would send men to the moon and back, it was not solely for a Cold War advantage, but for the advancement of all people. Despite his assassination and the deaths of the three Apollo 1 astronauts on Jan. 27, 1967, Kennedy's vision prevailed. When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, his first words didn't praise America, but all of humanity.
Sadly, since then space flight has made no further giant leaps for mankind. Beginning with the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous in 1975 and continuing to the international space stations of today, the space program has mostly promoted diplomacy and peace. This is a fine goal, especially when compared to the superpower hostilities that spawned the space race, but not the exciting stuff of NASA's heyday.
Even the scientific missions, which Columbia's final voyage was, don't exactly thrill us. Among the studies the STS-107 crew undertook were for human physiology, fire suppression, global climatology and the German Space Agency's earth-shattering experiment involving "development of the gravity-sensing organs of fish in the absence of gravity's effects." This is why we're spending billions of dollars to put human beings in a fragile pod attached to half a million gallons of rocket fuel? For fish?
Many publications have lamented the fact that Americans treat the shuttle program as so routine that it captures less of our imagination than television shows. However, the sad reality is that few people were consciously aware of the seven people who spent 16 days on Columbia because, quite frankly, their mission wasn't even as exciting as a Gene Roddenberry artificial creation. It had nothing to with which to capture our imaginations. The shuttles, which were given names like Enterprise, Challenger, Discovery and Endeavour, for the most part haven't lived up to them.
In the aftermath of the Columbia's explosive descent, the entire purpose of manned space flight is under scrutiny. If all we're doing is studying fish and fire suppression, it's been asked, why are we risking lives to do it? Shouldn't we just replace the shuttles with unmanned probes? And the blame may fall on an institution that's seen its ideals derailed and its budget slashed, yet still asked to perform miracles of modern science like putting people in orbit on a rocket and bringing them back in a glider (all with no real emergency contingencies), or deploying technological marvels like the Voyager satellites, the Hubble Telescope and the Mars Rover.
These criticisms lack both vision and imagination. Space flight represents the pinnacle of man's scientific achievements, quests to explore and fantasies to fulfill. It's like putting Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates and the Wright Brothers on a DC-9 (with nothing to consume but freeze-dried food and Tang) and strapping them to a Manhattan Project that launches them into Carl Sagan's and Isaac Asimov's dreamscapes. Along the way, technological revolutions occur for the rest of us bound by gravity, from personal computers and the Internet to Teflon and Velcro.
Why do we go to space? Ask John F. Kennedy, who understood both the burdens and the rewards of the most awesome undertaking in human history. Ask the members of Apollo 11, who left a plaque on the moon that reads, "We came in peace for all mankind." We go to space for the same reason every brave soul who probes an uncertain new frontier, consequences be damned, has attempted their missions since the beginning of time: to see what's out there.
Now is precisely the wrong time to scrap manned space exploration. In addition to sending a horrible message to the future scientists of the world — that discovery isn't worth the risks — it nullifies the cause for which the brave crews of the Columbia, Challenger and Apollo 1 gave their lives (which, in an eerie coincidence, all happened during a six day span on the calendar). However uninspiring the Columbia's experiments might have been, the best way to honor its fallen heroes is to expand both the ideals and the missions of NASA.
After Apollo 17 left the moon in 1972, no human has ever traveled beyond low-earth orbit. After the massive commitment required to reach the moon, we were content to simply pack up and spend the next 30 years performing the cosmological equivalent of circling the block. There are no visionary dreams, no pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. In short, we need the courage to accept a Kennedy moonshot quest for the new millennium.
Something similar was proposed once, but although it sunk in a sea of bureaucratic red ink, it remains a feasible goal. On July 20, 1989, the 20th anniversary of the first moon landing, President George H.W. Bush laid out a three-step project for an endeavor to Mars with an ultimate target year of 2019. Fourteen years later, on the 17th anniversary of the Challenger explosion, and four days before Columbia's breakup, President George W. Bush decided not to officially greenlight a new NASA project called "Prometheus," which will explore using nuclear power to fuel space travel, in his State of the Union Address (though he may still include funding for it in his 2004 budget). Bush instead included a $1.2 billion proposal for hydrogen fuel-cell cars "so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen." Children born in 2003 will reach their 16th birthdays in 2019.
With that synthesis in mind, it's time to combine these efforts. In 1961, John F. Kennedy issued a challenge to place not just an American flag, but a human being, on the moon in just over eight years. To reach Mars by 2019, we have twice the time and two new potential fuel sources to go with all the technological breakthroughs space exploration has brought us since. All we need now is the temerity we've lacked for three decades when, after taking that bold first step into the void, we retreated back to square one.
But if there's any legacy that Rick Husband, William McCool, Laurel Clark, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla and Ilan Ramon can leave us, it's that despite the risks, the voyage to the stars is still a noble enterprise and worth expanding upon to infinity.
This column is dedicated to the seven members of STS-107, every NASA member who saw them through on their voyage into space and their families. Godspeed to all of you. Mike Marchand's e-mail address is Marchand.3@alumni.nd.edu.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Monday, February 10, 2003
