Neil Speaks
You remember the old commercial that went, “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen”? Well, after 2,000 or some odd counts of fraud and some shady ties to the mob, Citigroup gobbled up their remains and people pretty much stopped listening; but the old tag line stuck in my head, and came back to mind when Neil Armstrong–a notoriously private man who rarely steps into the spotlight–penned a letter to the White House along with fellow Apollo astronauts Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan to express his concerns over the cancellation of NASA’s Constellation program.
“For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature,” they wrote. “Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity.”
Now loudmouths like me have blogged about this very thing before, but when the first man to walk on the moon has something to say on the subject–well, people listen. Coming as this does just when the president is outlining his own vision for NASA, Armstrong’s statement packs an even greater punch. He’s not the kind of person who chases cameras, or tries to one-up a sitting president. He means every word of it. And if he’s worried about America’s role in the future of manned spaceflight–not to mention its role as a world leader–then all of us have a reason to think twice.
Certainly all the talk about landing on asteroids and sending people to Mars sounds good and lofty–but seeing the president’s speech, it’s more than obvious that his heart isn’t in it. And this notion that private industry can take up the slack in developing systems to launch people into low Earth oribit, while laudable on its face, ignores some pretty important fundamentals of the marketplace. The amount of money required to design and build that kind of technology–versus the decades it would take to see any potential return on that investment–makes the cost prohibitively expensive for most if not any company that might want to try. That’s the reason that manned spaceflight has largely been the undertaking of governments. They’re the only ones who can afford it.
Sadly, I don’t see anything changing at this point. The White House has its own agenda, which consists of domestic initiatives that we can’t afford. When you’re shelling out nearly a trillion dollars in stimulus money, there ain’t a whole lot left for space exploration. But how long will it be before we start to realize what we’ve lost, not only in terms of technological innovation but the American spirit? This nation once sent men to the moon! How did we lose sight of that?
Decline, indeed.
Posted on April 17, 2010
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