Federal Judiciary

A Smaller Tomorrow -- By: Robert Costa

Yesterday afternoon, in a speech at the Kennedy Space Center, President Obama detailed the facets of his new space policy -- more research, a few more dollars, and, eventually, some merry, low-orbit commercial flights.

What he didn?t talk about is the moon, at least in any seriousness. ?I just have to say, pretty bluntly here, that we?ve been there before,? Obama declared in front of an eerily quiet NASA audience. ?There is a lot more of space to explore.?

Obama looks at the Constellation program, introduced by Pres. George W. Bush in 2004 with the goal of rocketing Americans back to the moon by 2020, and sees a problem he inherited, not a challenge to be met. Obama is axing the project a decade before the deadline, after $10 billion has been spent. ?No one is more committed to manned spaceflight, to the human exploration of space, than I am,? Obama said. ?But we?ve got to do it in a smart way. We can?t keep doing the same, old things.?

What about the thousands of NASA employees who will lose their jobs when the program goes under? The administration plans to channel $6 billion to commercial-spacecraft developers and cross its fingers that they hire the newly unemployed space workers. These firms launch rich folks into the clouds for weekend zooms around the Earth. Surely those posts are the aspiration of every first-class mathematician and aerospace engineer who grew up with eyes toward the sky.

Obama said his new policy will add 2,500 jobs to Florida?s space coast in the next two years, but even he admitted that space-shuttle workers will ?lose jobs.? When he spoke at the Kennedy Space Center during the run-up to the 2008 election, Obama vowed to protect the jobs of the facility?s workers before an audience that included them; not a single space worker was invited to attend yesterday?s speech.

Obama spoke about his policy as if it were part of some grand, JFK-style vision, when it really is anything but. In addition to mothballing space shuttles, cutting jobs, and eliminating rockets, America is losing something that Obama supposedly understands, namely the big picture, big dreams about the future. Obama said it himself: No longer do we have a ?singular goal? like ?reaching the moon.?

As for the future of manned space exploration -- to which he?s ?100 percent? committed -- Obama announced plans to develop a ?heavy lift rocket? to be our means of reaching deep space, a rocket that will take years to develop. He wants the design completed by 2015. By 2025, he wants to have a manned crew mission into deep space, then maybe a trip or two to an asteroid. By the 2030s, he wants to send a man to Mars. ?I expect to be around to see it,? he said.

You could almost hear the yawns in the NASA hangar. Without a clear vision from the president, just an urge to ?research,? the weary spacecrats know little will happen. Obama tried to lift spirits by saying he?ll revive the Orion rocket -- but only to use it as a lifeboat for the International Space Station. They knew the message behind the flowery prose: still no leadership on how to use the moon as a platform for further exploration, and a lot of talk about low-orbit excursions.

Obama?s is a stunted vision, and one that deliberately scales back the horizon for Western man, leaving the Chinese and Russians as de facto kings of the cosmos. Though the president believes that he?s smartly tossing a cumbersome program into the bin, along with its cowboy ethos, he forgets that astronauts are more than overpaid automatons of the state -- they?re heroes, men whose adventures are an instrumental part of America?s own.

Thankfully, many such heroes have stood together to protest Obama?s maneuvers. Neil Armstrong, who became the first man to walk on the moon in 1969, along with Gene Cernan, the last man to leave his footprints there, and Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell, sent the president a scathing letter Tuesday, calling Obama?s new policy ?devastating.? It wasn?t some puffed-up political press release, either. Armstrong, now 79 years old, is famously reticent about stepping into the spotlight. So when he speaks up, loudly, people listen.

?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 capacity to beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature,? wrote Armstrong and friends. ?While the president envisages humans traveling away from Earth and perhaps toward Mars at some time in the future, the lack of developed rockets and spacecraft will assure that ability will not be available for many years. 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.?

Later, more NASA luminaries added to the chorus. Moon walkers Charlie Duke, Alan Bean, and 19 other astronauts dashed off another letter to Obama. ?We strongly urge you to drop this misguided proposal that forces NASA out of human space operations for the foreseeable future,? they wrote. ?For those of us who have accepted the risk and dedicated a portion of our lives to the exploration of outer space, this is a terrible decision.?

This second letter?s authors ?see our human exploration program, one of the most inspiration tools to promote science, technology, engineering and math to our young people, being reduced again to mediocrity.? ?One of the greatest fears of any generation is not leaving things better for the young people of then next,? they conclude. ?In the area of human spaceflight, we are about to realize that fear.?

As this policy unfolds, the message will be clear: Resign yourself, NASA. Robot missions, space-station vacations, and the vague promise of journeys to nearby asteroids are your future. Your mission is no longer about imagination, exploration, and resolve but about budget numbers and jobs for a region in Florida. The president looks at moondust and sees dirt.

John F. Kennedy did get what the manned-spaceflight program was all about. When he traveled to Rice University in 1962, he declared that America was up for the challenge ahead and above. The country, he said, was about to set sail on the ?most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.? We choose to go the moon, ?and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.?

Seven years later, with one giant leap by Armstrong, JFK?s dream was realized. Thanks to President Obama, it now becomes but another fleeting moment of the past, abandoned and forgotten, replaced by empty promises and a smaller tomorrow.

-- Robert Costa is the William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow at the National Review Institute.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on April 16, 2010 (boomark / email).