Do we still have the right stuff?

With Neil Armstrong dead its a fair question to ask. Manned space flight has not developed very well since the Apollo program.

Of course, this is a relative perspective: China has the first module of a space station in orbit with the intent of expanding it. A Chinese moon mission is not out of the question. Iran has stated that it wants to put a man in space; I'm surprised India does not have a manned space program; and Japan could easily put a man in space if they really wanted to. Space exploration is more global now than half a century ago, which is of course a good thing.

Private enterprise is increasingly becoming a major part of space exploration. The first privately funded spacecraft made its first flight eight years ago, and Virgin Galactic, slowly but measurably, is taking progress towards routine tourist space flights. SpaceX is being set up, largely by NASA, to ferry supplies and crews to the international space station. This is happeningly a lot slower than I think alot of people would like, but it is happening, and that matters. By "we" I am speaking from the Western/American perspective: I am Canadian, and our space program and is tied up with theirs.

But we could be so much more. Its so hard to argue against what we could have, should have, may have been.

By the eighties we could have had a presence on or above the moon. Maybe not a complete moon colony, nothing like the Apollo program, but maybe smaller, more frequent flights to the moon with an orbiting laboratory. We should have had a smaller space station. We should have designed the shuttle more intelligently. Columbia and Challenger could have been avoided if there had been no external fuel tank or solid rocket boosters, both of which were concessions to keeping the cost of the program as low as possible.

I'd like to pin the reasons for the decline of the American space program, in ambition as well as materially, on knee-jerk drown-the-government-in-the-bathtub conservatives who view any tax increase as a declaration of war on their sacred freedoms and think science is strictly optional. But let's be real: even in times of prosperity the space program is difficult to rationalize. Remember eight years back when Bush promoted a moonbase? He may have been sincere, I won't deny him that, but I doubt that would have been his highest priority compared to Iraq and everything else he was mismanaging.

Our expectations for the future were inflated, yes. If we had gone back to the moon in the mid-nineties, hypothetically, I doubt much of consequence would have resulted. Going to Mars is complicated, people, even if you strip it down to the bones. We're not likely to have a large Apollo scale mission for at least a decade, no matter what country ends up pursuing it, and we have to live with it. Proposals will come and go.

We don't have the spark to truly motivate us as we did during the Cold War. That is deeply frustrating, knowing that our most commendable drives are tied to our reproachable ones. But that, unfortunately, is the way the human race works. We inflate our virtues---but I believe we equally inflate our vices.

I don't believe America or humanity is in terminal decline. Going through some of the most sucky times in a century, to be sure, but this is just the wheel of history going through some muddy ruts. Our eyes are still on the skies. I don't think our young are any more deprived of imagination than the one that preceeded it. We're definitely better off by having a glorious, albeit inaccurate perception of, history to help inspire us.

So we will have a glorious future. Its taking its sweet time to get here, but that is the problem with history. Once we slog through the bad parts, of course, we will somehow get there. Such is history.