Enjoy the last few flights of our Space Shuttle fleet. After it’s mothballed late next year, our nation, to the collective shame of our politicians, will have no U.S. capability to get our astronauts into space for quite possibly a decade or more to come.
Why? Because President Obama and most Members of Congress don’t consider our human spaceflight program to be a tangible vote-getter. As simple and as destructive as that.
During the presidential campaign in 2007, then-Senator Obama said he planned to pay for his $18 billion education plan by taking it out of the hide of NASA. In defending his desire to delay the Orion and Ares programs (the next generation crew spacecraft and rockets scheduled to succeed the space shuttle), he stressed, “We’re not going to have the engineers and scientists to continue space exploration if we don’t have kids who are able to read, write and compute.”
Contrast those words, uttered to appease teachers unions, with those of President John F. Kennedy 45 years earlier in defense of the U.S. human spaceflight program: “…We mean to be part of it — we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond. … Our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us … to become the world’s leading spacefaring nation.”
Well, after basically five decades of being the “world’s leading spacefaring nation,” we are handing that status over to the military-controlled program of the People’s Republic of China with lesser trinkets being awarded to Russia, India and the European Union. To facilitate the ending of our human spaceflight program, President Obama created a rubber-stamp called “The U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee.” A committee that, purely by coincidence, concluded that the 2020 return date to the moon for U.S. astronauts — as proposed by President George W. Bush in 2004 — is not affordable nor needed.
During a recent speech at the “Race to the Moon: a Celebration with Space Legends” dinner at the USS Midway Museum in San Diego, newly appointed NASA administrator Charles Bolden — a true American hero as a former combat marine aviator and astronaut — disappointed a number of the attendees by avoiding the need to return U.S. astronauts to the moon. Instead of reinforcing the words articulated by Kennedy, Bolden weakly offered, “…NASA must pursue innovations to lower the cost of space exploration…,” and “…we can use the lunar surface for a new era of robotic exploration and as a test-bed for exploration technologies…”
As heroic and well-meaning as Bolden may be, as NASA administrator, he can only do and say what the president and the West Wing script. As such, his job is to sell and justify the dismantling of our human spaceflight program. Period. Normally, Congress could object, but as most don’t see votes in space, they remain mute.
As we have all witnessed these last few months, in order to please various special interest groups, President Obama and Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, are anxious to spend (and waste) hundreds of billions of our money. Shockingly, from that obscene amount, they can’t find a tiny percentage to increase the knowledge, security, and commerce that would surely come our way as a direct result of continued U.S. preeminence in space.
Too bad, because rather than continue in first place, the U.S. will eventually be last in space.
