Abandoning the space race

When archaeologists unearth the relics of the American Century, the space race will be our Holy Grail. Space was our New World. In 1962, when John F. Kennedy declared “we choose to go to the moon,” he encouraged every American to look up to the stars and summon the spirit of Columbus staring across the Atlantic. During the Apollo program every American taxpayer became a deckhand on the voyage to the moon. It was a journey that created the world we now live in, spawning GPS systems, plastics, alloy metals, cordless power tools and cancer detecting CAT scans

Our trip to space also distinguished America from its predecessors. European Empires once drew maps with an eye on colonialism, dividing the world into arbitrary national borders. With a picture taken from the moon, America provided the world with a new map: one planet without boundaries.

This administration’s budget has cancelled the shuttle program—ending human space flight—while also killing the shuttle’s much vaunted replacement: the Constellation Program.

Under the proposal, if Americans wants to go to space in the visible future they will have to catch a ride with the Russians or Chinese.

In a speech scheduled to take place in Florida on April 15, the administration will provide justification for ending fifty years of accumulated wisdom. A generation back this would have been a hard sell. This is the equivalent of hanging a foreclosure sign on a vital piece of the American imagination while depriving future generations of the discoveries that accompany a sustained public investment in science.

The space shuttle would cost $2.4 billion per year to continue flying and development of the Constellation Program would have averaged just over $10 billion each year. To suggest that cancelling the space program is a matter of “fiscal responsibility” is difficult to accept from a government that squandered $787 billion in stimulus funding while pushing a $1 trillion health care overhaul upon a country that doesn’t want it.

It’s about priorities and vision. This is a classic case of a generation not knowing how to manage what it has inherited.