Today is scheduled to be the end of the shuttle program. There is some happy talk about future space missions — when President Bush started the process to decommission the shuttle fleet, it was bases on the moon; now that President Obama has scuttled the moon bases, it’s private space flight. But, I get the feeling that we as a country are simply finished with space flight for the foreseeable future. It’s like the talk of a long distance relationship when you and your high school sweetheart go off to college. Maybe your intentions are good, but in all likelihood, the relationship is over.
I can understand the argument that space flight was expensive and maybe didn’t return a great deal. (I could argue with the latter – intensive government funded R&D on the space program had some remarkable returns). But, really, space flight is what made us great. When America finally crumbles into history (in the hopefully very distant future), if there are still humans around to do the remembering, one of the first things we’ll be remembered for is putting a man on the moon. In terms of achievements, that’s up there with Magellan circumnavigating the globe.
But, abandoning the space program seems to be part of a larger symptom. We’ve given up on being great and improving. Far from being committed to improving the things and society we’ve created, we seem resigned to the idea that we can’t even keep what we have, and that we should be content merely trying to slow the deterioration. Social Security, Medicare, a living wage, infrastructure, housing, education — all must be less than they were. We are not at present a people who could have put a man on the moon; at present, we couldn’t even build an interstate system or a transcontinental rail system. We can barely remain committed to maintaining the ones we have. I read too much science fiction, so I’m reminded of the decaying Empire based in Trantor from Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series. There is also a whiff of fatalism, as if we’ve Fallen from an Edenic state of grace and have been deteriorating ever since.
My tendency is to blame a commitment to low taxes on the ultra-wealthy above all else. Others tend to blame the rise of the rest of the world coupled with a laziness and softening of the American people. There is probably some truth to all of it (though, obviously, my belief is that the scale is tilted in favor of my tendency!). Nevertheless, I see a disturbing lack of optimism among Americans. As if we will never again attempt something transcendent because it would cost too much. As the man said, we know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Update Someone sent me this graph of NASA’s budget as compared to what we spend on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan:
I blame lawyers, myself.
The end of the space program is profoundly depressing, and the fact is for many people, building great civic institutions is less important than building their own wealth. Right now, I am watching Morning Joe talk about the morning jobs figures, and I don’t know what’s more depressing: the numbers or the debate. That said, plenty of people work every day to make the world a better place: for better health, greater safety, better education and even, still, increased scientific knowledge. When I lose my own optimism, I try to borrow from theirs, or at least admire their determination. Some days I need it more than others.
Yeah, but…
We elected a black president. Gay rights are moving in the right direction. Drug manufacturers are continually churning out drugs that save lives, and surgeries that used to take hours and be risky are now safer and take much less time (my mom got a new hip in under an hour, and my dad recovered completely from prostate cancer). We can go online – using a handheld device – and view a street 2000 miles away from where we are sitting. And we can talk (for free) to a person standing on that street.
It’s not our world anymore – it’s the next generations’, and while they may see things differently, they will certainly eventually make the world a better place. Maybe just not in ways we think.
Color me still optimistic. In spite of it all. (And especially in spite of politicians.)
It was not a coincidence that the glory days of the space program occurred during the baby boom. A nation that is growing demographically (through births to its own citizens, not through immigration) has the resources and incentives to think big.
I also don’t think that it is a coincidence that our malaise seems to have begun in 1973, the start of the “baby bust”.
So, Doug. How many kids do you have again?
Doug, as a liberal, you also need to take responsibility for how the liberal lament, “if we could put a man on the moon, [insert liberal welfare-industrial complex wish list here]” did to the space program.
The space program was crowded out by welfare and entitlements, not tax cuts for the rich.
Buzz, tax rates are at their lowest point since the 50’s. The old refrain that tax cuts aren’t part of the problem is as tiresome as it is inaccurate.
Your assertion about welfare crowding out the space program is as laughable. From the CATO Institute in Sept 2010 (hardly a liberal bastion):
“In recent years, federal spending on TANF has been held fairly constant at somewhat less than $20 billion per year.12 Combined federal and state TANF spending was about $26 billion in 2006.13 About 41 percent was for direct cash assistance, with the remainder of the subsidies for childcare, transportation, work support, and education and training.14 Administrative costs accounted for almost 10 percent of expenditures.15”
When TANF replaced AFDC in the 1996 reform law, defense spending was $300bln. Now it is over $1trln.
Blaming lack of funding, or ANY current budget problems on welfare is a canard.
Marc, tax rates are irrelevant. Look at the amount of revenues paid by each income range. Upper income people pay much more in taxes than they did when the rates were much higher (and the deductions far more numerous).
Any fair analysis of the numbers shows that you and Doug are wrong, and “the rich” pay far more than their “fair share”.
I am using the word welfare in much broader terms than just AFDC. Let’s just say spending in general. You could include defense spending in that, I don’t have a problem with that, although defense spending as a % of the economy and per capita was much higher than now during the golden age of the space program.
I posted an update with a graph someone sent me comparing the 2011 NASA budget with air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We still have a space program. It’s just largely unmanned. When the space shuttle became less reliable (it got destroyed in flight too often, resulting in too many delays), the military stopped using the shuttle to deliver its payloads. Without the military payloads, it was harder for hawkish politicians to be convinced that having people fly around low-earth orbit because it’s cool and might teach us something was worth paying for.
That being said, I personally find space flight much more worth my money than air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that’s just me. I don’t tend to go to Florida, because it’s uncomfortably hot. But I would go to space if given the chance.
T pointed out the distinction I was going to make. It’s *not* the end of space flight. It may be the end of *manned* (*personned*?) spaceflight for a while though.
The shuttle *was* both statistically unsafe *and* unreliable; we never approached anything like the number of missions that were originally foreseen. It was also overkill – you don’t need to send up 7 astronauts to launch a satellite.
And I’m not sure that the research the astronauts conducted was very useful compared to what unmanned flights did – thinking back over the past 10 years, the Mars rover and the Cassini probe produced much more interesting information than any shuttle mission I remember.
The Apollo program was pretty awesome…but it was also 90% a product of the Cold War. The US wasn’t trying so much to put a man on the moon for its own sake as we were doing so to show the rest of the world that we were more advanced than the USSR (something that Sputnik and early US space missions had called into question). At that time, NASA spending was basically military spending.
So the low tax mantra, etc. don’t, IMO, really have much to do with the shrinking of the space program any more than low taxes are responsible for the abandonment of the M-60 tank. The M-60 was abandoned because it was no longer militarily useful; so was most of the space program.
I’m just adolescent enough to think, basically, that we ought to be doing cool shit in space.
I’m just adolescent enough to think the next generations will come up with even better, cooler shit to dream about & accomplish. Whether it’s this very next generation or a few more down the road, space exploration will continue. It has to. Space is the final frontier for crying out loud!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a bit melancholy about the passing of an era too. But it’s more a “times they are a-changin and I don’t know where they are a- goin” sort of melancholy.
You are right about this whiff of fatalism. And I’m so very bone-weary over all the anger and hatred that has come with it. I’m hoping this is just a phase in America’s growth–a midlife crisis and not a virulent cancer.
I’m just naive enough to have thought that a President who had huge backing by an anti-war movement, might have have concluded at least Iraq by now, thereby at the very least eliminated the cost for friggin’ air conditioning- much less the loss of life on all sides.
I posted this on twitter during the launch, over several tweets:
$786B for the war in Iraq (the one Cheney said would cost $2B) – Can you imagine what NASA could have done with that? Hello base on IO.
135 Shuttle Missions at about $450M per mission (http://1.usa.gov/oIjWxH) = $61B, War in Iraq = $786B. You decide.
So for the cost of the war in just Iraq we could have had 1738 STS missions.
When we start talking about cutting medicare, education, and women’s health keep the picture of this in your head: http://costofwar.com/en/