Can you hear me, Major Tom?

Last week I lis­tened to streams of meet­ings of the Human Space Flight Review Com­mit­tee.  While lis­ten­ing, I was reminded of how many peo­ple I know see the space pro­gram.  When I say I’m going back to school either to get an aero­space or mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing degree, I usu­ally get greeted with  over­whelm­ing enthu­si­asm.  Peo­ple who’ve known me a very long time, espe­cially, know that the dream of work­ing in this arena goes back to my ear­li­est grade school days, and that I’m cer­tainly bright enough to do it.  All I need is to fig­ure out the “how.” But there’s that other camp, who react to my news with wrin­kled noses and con­fused faces.  They start talk­ing, and it becomes clear that they view the space pro­gram is a big laser light show, full of daz­zling dis­plays of expen­sive friv­o­lity.  In times where the econ­omy is sink­ing, it’s a waste­ful indul­gence in their eyes.  The prac­ti­cal­ity is lost on them, and they just kind of bog­gle at me for a bit.   Usu­ally they recover, after a lit­tle bit of lis­ten­ing to me rave about how happy it would make me, and leave me with some­thing along the lines of, “well, you are pretty weird.  I guess it does sound like a good fit.”

Over the past week I heard a lot of talk about how NASA is fail­ing to cap­ture the imag­i­na­tions of adults and youth alike.  Most of the peo­ple at these con­fer­ences had a vested inter­est in NASA, so they were look­ing to rekin­dle the pio­neer­ing spirit of Amer­i­cans.  My daily inter­ac­tions con­firm the lack­lus­tre image that human space­flight has taken on lately.  More and more often I’m hear­ing peo­ple rant about how we need to get rid of that “waste of a space pro­gram.”  This, from Alabama natives — who have cell phones in their pock­ets, who use the Inter­net daily, and prob­a­bly ate a microwaved meal or two in the last 24 hours!  It’s becom­ing a more main­stream, accepted view­point that NASA is utter frivolity.

Now, I do under­stand there are valid con­cerns with how money is being spent, and what goals the gov­ern­ment and pri­vate indus­try should play.  When we’re talk­ing about health care, no one (well, almost no one) starts shout­ing about how we don’t need doc­tors any­way, do they?   When we argue about edu­ca­tion, even those peo­ple who would abol­ish the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion still believe in the value of edu­ca­tion.  They just don’t want it dic­tated by the gov­ern­ment.  But with human space­flight, peo­ple will skip argu­ing those issues and start argu­ing that humans have no busi­ness leav­ing our atmos­phere, and every­thing we need to do can be done with robots, end of story.  The sta­tus quo is just fine, thanky­ou­very­much, why do we have to push for­ward any fur­ther?  Unfor­tu­nately, when peo­ple start talk­ing in such terms, I tend to shut them down before they can get very far.  While I’m glad that my pas­sion is evi­dent, I really would like to under­stand why peo­ple feel that way.

It exas­per­ates me that 40 years ago NASA’s work was our shin­ing achieve­ment, but now they’ve fallen largely out of favor.  It’s not a mat­ter of squan­der­ing money, either.  Unlike most gov­ern­ment spend­ing, NASA’s work has paid for that invest­ment hun­dreds of times over in returns to the qual­ity of life of the peo­ple.  Work­ing on a shoe­string bud­get, NASA has con­tin­ued to do won­der­ful work that out­strips their own pro­jec­tions by years and years.  Look at the shut­tle!  We’ve made do with equip­ment that is far past it’s prime, and peo­ple are sug­gest­ing that we still try and extend the life of the shut­tle a few more years.  That kind of thrift is extra­or­di­nary, but we take it for granted now.  NASA’s excep­tional track record is the rea­son, yet it’s vil­i­fied con­sis­tently and incor­rectly as a bor­ing, waste­ful pro­gram that does noth­ing for any­one but a few aca­d­e­mics in ivory towers.

Is it a break­down of the PR machine? Are peo­ple fright­ened?  Or just plain unimaginative? 35 years of not leav­ing Earth’s orbit?  Bored now?  Unable to see past the next decade?   I imag­ine all of those fac­tors are in play, as well as a dis­en­chant­ment in gen­eral brought on by eco­nomic down­turns.  What­ever it is, my chil­dren don’t need to be coaxed into under­stand­ing how impor­tant space explo­ration is.  They see it nat­u­rally, with­out any (inten­tional) pros­e­ly­tiz­ing on my part at all.  We look into the beau­ti­ful black open­ness of the skies and see pos­si­bil­i­ties and hope.  Lis­ten­ing to that kind of neg­a­tivism and lack of vision always just strength­ens my resolve to want to be a part of those who get us out there into the stars.