Neil Armstrong, what happened to your legacy? In your time, kids wanted to be either the president or an astronaut when they grew up. Look at us now so many of our profession-minded youth want to go to Wall Street or even just want to write successful blogs. What happened to our admiration for what lies beyond? What happened to America's top scientists at NASA miraculously finding ways to take humanity beyond the confines of our planet?
What happened? NASA died,and all of America is complicit.
The big question is why? In the 1960s, the race to get to the moon was a major driving force behind American engineering. Scientists and intellectuals were very appreciative of NASA, as it sparked an immense interest in space exploration, which caused an incredible amount of new grant money to be available. The American people were behind it too I'd be hard pressed to find a government bureaucracy more popular than NASA was in the 1960s. With the support of the people and the incredible resources Congress was willing to put into the last major goal of the recently deceased President Kennedy, NASA had everything it needed to produce miracles like the Moon landing.
These days, though, people are completely unaware of NASA's work, and its budget has suffered as a result. Sure, everyone knows NASA's great recent failures. Among the most famous failures is the disaster of the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999, which disintegrated in the Martian atmosphere because of an idiotic mix-up between imperial and metric units. But how many people know the names of the two rovers currently on Mars, which have long outlived their expected lifetime and provided an unparalleled wealth of information about the red planet? We seem much more interested in cosmic disasters than successes.
The fact of the matter is that people don't care about NASA anymore, and it's having trouble changing their minds. Despite NASA's growing budget, the public's perception of it has worsened. Some even argue that, in light of the recent economic crisis, NASA's budget should even be disproportionately cut to allow other programs more funding (for reference, NASA's 2009 budget was $17 billion, which is less than one percent of the federal stimulus package). NASA died not because its missions failed, but because the people lost interest in the skies above them.
And don't think it isn't dead. The space shuttle, a craft built largely using available technology from the 1970s, is scheduled to be retired this year. But are we ready with a replacement to continue sending people into space to visit the International Space Station and service our orbiting telescopes, the least of which is the equally aged Hubble? Not at all.
From the end of this year through 2015, NASA will have no way to send humans into space. In the meantime, our plan is to rely on the Russians and their equally aged Soyuz spacecraft, which more resembles an orbiting lifeboat than a scientific spacecraft. And don't think it was the end of the Cold War that killed NASA either; between 1966 and 1973, NASA's budget was cut almost in half.
The gravest issue that NASA's declining prestige presents is the question of our future. Sure, getting intelligent folks on Wall Street and in the great investment banking firms is important to keep our economy afloat, but programs like NASA are the programs that will propel mankind into the future. I've already written about the benefits space exploration has produced for mankind today, but what about tomorrow? Who knows what experiments on a lunar base could yield? The ISS has already made major breakthroughs in microgravity experiments; with further developments, a lunar base could play host to a series of extreme pressure experiments, as the surface has effectively no atmosphere. Astonishing discoveries have already been made close to the Earth's atmosphere, like those of the Hubble Space Telescope, so who knows what mysteries lie waiting to be solved out in the cosmos?
For almost all of human history, mankind has been fascinated by the stars, creating elaborate myths of what they represent and the stories they might be trying to tell us. It is only recently that we stopped looking up as a species, perhaps because we have grown too focused on the hubbub of modern life and perhaps because the lights of our cities are blocking out the stars. Regardless, we should be looking to the stars as the oft-quoted "final frontier," and a strong NASA is the first step toward achieving that.
