Fly Like an Eagle

In the night sky of 1957’s Autumn, people could see the glowing dot of man’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1. It was a colossal embarrassment for the U.S. government and a great achievement for the Soviet Union. But America rallied and made it all the way to the Moon the year I was born.

So earlier today, the last space shuttle launch happened and the last mission for the program got underway.  I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. On one hand, the United States has abandoned manned space missions and likely will never return to government ones in my lifetime. On the other hand, one of the biggest wastes of time, energy, and money by our government is finally coming to an end. This is not a knock on the astronauts, but on the NASA bureaucrats who designed the program and ran it.

The space shuttle never lived up to a fraction of what it promised to do. Regular spaceflight is still an elusive goal as is doing it cheaply. Two spectacular and preventable accidents killed fourteen astronauts along the way. Did we get the big space stations and labs in the sky we should have had by now? I’m sorry to say the International Space Station is nothing to be excited about. About the only real gain out of all this was the Hubble being refurbished and its achievements in astronomy.

For those of us who grew up in the 1970’s or before, there was promise of great things just around the corner in space exploration. Large space stations, moon colonization, manned missions to Mars, and further exploration into the unknown. None of those things have happened and it is decades later with every attempt to do so shot down before it goes anywhere.  As an American, I find it tragic that we will now have to hitch rides with the Russians to even get to the I.S.S.!

Maybe the mistake was relying on the federal government to do something so important. Maybe the comfortable laziness spawned by too much material wealth stripped us of any daring. That promised future which gleamed so brightly in the night sky looks lost right now.

Our only hope is now with private firms going into space.