In Which Greg Rambles About Space
The proposed budget is going to kill the proposed moon mission. In an effort to rein in the United States’ deficit, President Obama is cutting back on over a hundred government programs, including NASA.
Is this a temporary cut? Probably. NASA has always been a political football. It’s safe to assume that, at some point in the future, this president or another will increase funding for the agency.
Except this budget reduction scrubs more than just the lunar and Martian missions. The budget would most likely kill the space shuttle fleet’s replacement, the Ares 1. With the fleet’s retirement scheduled after this year’s five remaining launches, this leaves the American manned space program without transport off-planet. I know the shuttle’s retirement was going to leave the United States without space vehicles for a few years– a period of five years where NASA would transport astronauts to the International Space Station via Russian craft– but this extends that indefinitely.
We spent three brief years traveling to the moon. Three years. Of the Apollo missions, only five of them involved man setting foot on the moon. (Apollo 13 was intended as a landing, but, for obvious reasons, that didn’t happen.)
Twelve people have walked on the moon.
Think about that for a minute. In less than a decade, the human race went from putting a man into orbit to landing on the moon.
And after three short years, stopped.
I grew up in awe of space exploration. One of my earliest memories is a news broadcast about the loss of the Challenger. When my family moved to Florida, I visited Cape Canaverel several times, walked along the Saturn booster, crawled through the shuttle simulator. I watched shuttles climb until they were out of sight and stared at the plume of exhaust until it dissipated.
I don’t understand why, but we’ve lost our drive for space. There’s no longer a sense of awe or desire to reach out and touch it, to see it for ourselves, with our own eyes.
Today is also the seventh anniversary of the loss of the Columbia.
Hell of a way to mark the day.
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