Somber opinions on the space program from Charles Krauthammer:
WASHINGTON — Michael Crichton once wrote that if you had told a physicist in 1899 that within a hundred years humankind would, among other wonders (nukes, commercial airlines), “travel to the moon, and then lose interest … the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad.” In 2000, I quoted these lines expressing Crichton’s incredulity at America’s abandonment of the moon. It is now 2009 and the moon recedes ever further.
Next week marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. We say we will return in 2020. But that promise was made by a previous president, and this president has defined himself as the anti-matter to George Bush. Moreover, for all Obama’s Kennedyesque qualities, he has expressed none of Kennedy’s enthusiasm for human space exploration.
I’ve heard the long-term problem that NASA faces summed up in these terms:
The Cycle of NASA Failure.
- They get a twenty-year program from an administration.
- They get their funding cut for that program over the next four to eight years.
- They get a new twenty-year program from the next administration.
Keep repeating until we no longer have a viable manned space program, which should hit sometime next year when the Shuttle gets retired. It’s going to be what, 2015 before Constellation gets off the ground? Assuming that it does, of course. In the meantime, I suppose that we could go with private space initia…
BWAHHAHAH-AHAHHA-HAHAAHAAAH!
(pause)
Sorry about that; I thought that I could write that and not break down in cynical laughter, but I can’t. Like a Democratic-controlled White House and Congress would ever consent to giving up government oversight on anything. Even if they hate doing manned space exploration anyway – and trust me: a political party that would put someone like Barney Frank in charge of Financial Services is a political party that hates doing manned space exploration – these people think in terms of bureaucratic turf wars, and bureaucrats never voluntarily give up oversight over something once they have it.
So, I guess that we’re stuck, then. Maybe space enthusiasts can start learning Mandarin or Hindustani (ahem)
Moe Lane
Crossposted to Moe Lane.
Moe Lane
Steve Maley
KnightsofMalta
Dan Spencer
Dan McLaughlin
I grew up with The Space Age.
Achance (Diary) Friday, July 17th at 11:45AM EST (link)As far back as I can remember I was fascinated with rockets and space travel. i had a crazy cousin, I guess that’s what he was, a great aunt’s son, who was some sort of civilian electronics type for the Army. All his Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Popular Electronics and such came to me when I was a kid. I sure wish I had some of those old tube type radios that I disassembled and “repaired” as a boy of eight or ten. Anyway, in those pages you could follow the quest for space and ultimately the Moon and the planets, step by painstakng and sometimes painful step. I read and loved every word of it. You could still buy the stuff to make things go bang at the drugstore in those days. Nobody gave a second’s thought to a 12 year old ording, say, five pounds of potassium nitrate from the drug store. A length of seamless steel conduit made a good fuselage. Sheet metal could be cut into fins and Jake, the black man who worked as a hand on a friends farm and could weld and such, could braze them on. A nose cone could be whittled to shape in balsa and sanded smooth then use to make a mold in plaster and then filled with that new-fangled epoxy glue that would then harden if you were careful and lucky. We even broke into the high school auto shop by dark of night a few times and used their lathe to turn nose cones from aluminum. Some flew far over farms and fields, some not so far, and some blew up rather dramatically. It is remarkable that all of us still have both eyes and all our fingers and limbs because we did have some rather spectacular, cop bringing, explosions. In many ways I, too, lived the plot of that movie “October Skies.”
Fast forward to 1969 and it had been a long time as 19 yr. olds measure time since I had read Popular Science and played with rockets. But even those of us whose hair and habits were pushing the social envelope of those days in the main retained our interest in things stellar. We watched the news coverage of the launch and the journey to the Moon on the TV in the Student Union and on the night of July 20th listened and watched in snowy black and white, our TV and the TV from the Moon, with Clarke and Cronkhite as those first steps were taken. For all that was bad in those days, that alone made it a great time to be alive. And, yes, even then, the Left was agin’ it all.
In Vino Veritas
My dad was in the thick of it
Lammo (Diary) Friday, July 17th at 12:46PM EST (link)working for the Boeing Aerospace Company for 37 years. In our house it was Aviation Week and Space Technology that I used to drool over. The astronauts were my heroes and I still have the Apollo mission patches that my dad brought back from Cape Kennedy (before they re-renamed it Cape Canaveral). Dad passed away two years ago and I’m actuall glad that he’s not around to see the dismantling and abandonment of something he spent his whole life working on.
Don’t be so open minded that your brains fall out. (John Corapi, The Black Sheep Dog)