Sat, 30 Apr 2005

This site is dedicated to the conceit that you are willing to read something I have written. Not too much of a conceit is it, considering that you are right now umm.... never mind.

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Posted Apr 30, 2005 at 06:19 UTC, 737 words,  [/shiloh]  Permalink

E.T., Bring A Gun

What NASA Needs Is A Good Enemy

When I was growing up in the 1960s, one of the most exciting things on TV was the launches of the astronauts into space. I would follow the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions from beginning to end, and I prided myself on learning everything I could about the spacecraft and their operation.

Although I learned much about the technical details of the missions and the hardware, one thing of which I was only dimly aware was the "Space Race". I was too young to remember President Kennedy's address to Congress where he set the now-famous goal of getting a man on the moon and safely back by the end of the decade. I do remember a cover of Time magazine (6 December 1968) showing a spacesuited astronaut and cosmonaut running towards the moon, but I never paid too much attention to those articles. I would skip straight to the biographies of the crew and to the mission profile.

But even while all this was going on, there were unsettling things happening, which only became apparent to me as I grew in awareness of the political side of space exploration. NASA's budget, which peaked in the mid-1960s, went into a fairly steady decline in the 1970s and beyond. After the six Apollo moon landings, the American space program suddenly ran out of gas. Skylab went up and around and around and around for months at a time. We even had a joint mission with the Soviets, a magnanimous gesture by us, the "winners" of the space race. The Space Shuttle started out as a proposal to get people and cargo into orbit cheaply and often, but it suffered from numerous budget cutbacks and consequent redesigns. Originally scheduled to fly in the mid-1970s, the first shuttle, Columbia, didn't fly until 1981. People started to ask the question: once the shuttle gets up there, what will it do?

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Posted Apr 30, 2005 at 04:13 UTC, 3133 words,  [/rich]  Permalink