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Will China shame the US back to strong space program?
TweetMany of today’s maturing baby boomers cling to fond childhood memories of elementary-school assemblies where they’d sit knee-to-knee on freshly waxed floors and peer intently onto small-screen black and white TV sets to witness the dawn of the American space age. During those exciting Mercury, Gemini and Apollo launches in the 1960s and early ’70s, enthusiasm, adventure and national pride united them.
A sense of fierce competitiveness with the then Soviet Union also energized those children and most all Americans. After all, the Soviets, through their launch of Sputnik I in 1957, essentially shamed the United States into its massive, multi-trillion-dollar goal-oriented journey into outer space. When Ohioan Neil Armstong made his historic “small step for man” but “giant leap for mankind” onto the lunar surface in July 1969, America celebrated its come-from-behind victory with boundless elation and gratification.
Much has changed in space science and in the world order in the ensuing five decades. The Soviet Union has crumbled, its leading nation Russia has long lost its superpower lustre, China has emerged as a daunting global force and the government-sanctioned manned space program in the United States has become a mere shadow of its former robust and glorious self.
So much so, in fact, that some may wonder whether history may repeat itself in the 21st century. This time, could it be China that will shame the United States back into a serious program of space exploration and conquest?
CHINA’S AGGRESSIVE 5-YEAR PLAN
Just last week, China announced plans for an aggressive state-sponsored program to launch space labs and prepare to build space stations over the next five years.
The country says it will continue its exploration of the moon using probes, start gathering samples of the moon’s surface, land an astronaut on the lunar surface and “push forward its exploration of planets, asteroids and the sun.”
Contrast those ambitious goals with those of the U.S. space program. Funding for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been decimated in the current federal budget, plans for a return to the moon and other ambitious missions have been scrubbed or substantially cut back, thousands of talented NASA workers have lost their jobs and America’s working space program largely has been privatized.
Just last week, NASA announced that a private California company — SpaceX — will attempt the first-ever commercial cargo run to the International Space Station in February. The unmanned Dragon capsule will fly to the space station and dock with a load of supplies. While we wish success for the project, any failures or problems will undoubtedly reflect more profoundly on the pride of this country, not the profits of the Paypal-tied company.
Indeed China cites the effect on national pride as well worth the cost of its massive investment. Its space program already has made major breakthroughs in a relatively short time, and it is on track to replace the U.S. as the leader in space-station development.
Will we care? To be sure, much has changed in the U.S. since the launch of Mercury I, not the least of which is decreasing awe over 60 years of almost routinized manned space travel. One thing that has not changed, however, is that fierce competitiveness and drive for achievement that energized millions of American schoolchildren of the ‘60s.
Washington bureaucrats and congressional delegations would do well to remember that when debating the dollars and sense of the future course of America’s once-proud space agency.
© 2012 Vindy.com. All rights reserved. A service of The Vindicator.
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Comments
I sure hope so
I agree with the basic thrust of this editorial. However, I must make one small but important correction.
The U.S. space program was never funded at a level that would come close to a "massive, multi-trillion dollar" budget. This widespread misperception has done much damage to NASA over the past 60 years. In the 1966, NASA's budget peaked at slightly less than 4.5% of the federal budget, with a total outlay of $5.9 billion then-year dollars, or about $32B FY2007-dollars (corrected for inflation). For FY2012, it is expected that NASA will receive less than 0.5% of the budget, or somewhere between $17B and $18B.
The total federal expenditure on NASA since it was founded in 1958 has been less than $1 trillion, even after adjusting for inflation. Compare that to the amount of our treasury spent on TARP, the stimulus, bail-outs, foreign wars, "security contractors," etc, and you will see where our politicians' true priorities are.
For a President who likes to emphasize about how we need to increase our STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine) education, he is truly missing the boat regarding NASA. If there is one federal agency that inspires our youth to get into STEM, it is NASA.
We should properly fund NASA because of the benefits to ourselves, regardless of what China, India, Russia, or any other foreign space power is doing.
Therefore, we should set NASA's budget at 1.5% to 2% of the federal budget. A robust and inspiring space program does not have to break the bank, nor does it have to revert to the levels seen back in the sixties. But it does need to be consistently funded at a level that will help establish a sustainable space infrastructure.
Our use of space resources touches many things you probably do every day. Communications satellites, weather satellites, GPS satellites, Earth monitoring satellites, national defense satellites, and many other types of space assets are now tightly integrated into our modern society. Anyone who uses a phone, owns a GPS, watches TV, checks the weather channel, checks email, browses the Internet, or even lives in a country whose national defense is intimately tied to satellites, depends on space resources.
So sure, if you live under a rock, space has nothing to do with you. Otherwise, yes, we should be willing to spend a wee little bit of our immense wealth on investing in the future.
And it's pretty silly to talk about printing funny money to pay for NASA, when we're spending less than 50 cents out of every 100 federal budget dollars on it. Look at any federal budget pie chart and you will immediately see where the big changes must be made in order to balance the budget: national defense, medicare/medicaid, unemployment/welfare, and yes, interest on the national debt. Those are the drivers of our federal deficit, not NASA, or any of the other single-digit federal outlays that are routinely put forth as spending scapegoats. Until that reality is faced by our politicians and voters, we will continue to be awash in debt for the foreseeable future.
mshack625,
I must say that I do agree with you as the rate of return from the space program has been huge. We used do these sort of things because we are Americans! Now, we give $500M to Solyndra and get back nothing. My son is in medical research at OSU and he gets pissed off with the way we waste federal money. His point is that we are better off spending the $500M by giving $2M to 250 different researchers to fund their research. That is 250 ideas with many brains working on each research idea. But, politically, it is not attractive. Anyway, BHO couldn't find his a$$hole with a funnel.
DEBTOR NATIONS SUCH AS THE UNITED STATES SHOULDN'T BE FUNDING ANYTHING BUT IT'S OWN BOTTOM LINE .
No debtor nation has ever won a war> let the wealthier nations step up and fund medical research and space and frogs and whatever else the lame politcians can think of to line their friends pockets