Some time ago I ran across a blog post on the web, titled, “We went to the moon. Then we built a lot of Wal-Marts.”
That remark, attributed to a “young person,” pretty much sums up my dismay (as a long-time member of what Miles O’Brien calls Space Cadet Nation) at our generations-long decline of vision and spirit with regard to the exploration of space, our quest for knowing what really lies on the moon and Mars, which for me are bound inextricably with knowing who we are as a species, where we have been, where we may need to go, and caring for ourselves and our planet. For as long as human space exploration has been a serious possibility—say, starting in the 1940s—there has been a quite valid school of thought that says: we should take care of our own house first, and deal with all the problems of the human race on earth before venturing elsewhere.
Of course we should meet the needs of people on earth—and in our own nation. But I don’t believe that precludes seeking our destiny, and our history, beyond the earth. Ever since the end of the Apollo program and the first years of the shuttle, America’s investment of both money and mind in the space program has been pitifully small. During the same period, we have seen the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the “middle class” become a quaint notion that politicians can occasionally invoke. Once upon a time in my youth, we used to subscribe to the idea that everybody deserved a good education, but no longer. It’s like health care: if you want it, you can damn well pay for it yourself. It’s not the public’s problem, not the government’s problem.
There are nearly seven billion people crowding this earth now, and with the ruination of our environment and the changes that Nature has in store for us, we may well want or need to be able to go elsewhere. That would take some doing, and we have really not even started. On the moon there is, we are told, a rich store of Helium-3 that could solve our energy needs. If the USA is not interested, then China most certainly is.
I don’t know what the answer is, and maybe it isn’t NASA at all. We seem to have lost the right stuff a long time ago, but perhaps someone still has it. Dickie Branson, or Bert Rutan, or Elon Musk, or Bob Bigelow, or someone else. I just know that as much as I want peace on earth, and that its people know love and care, I still want to look up and have some real hope that our future lies in the stars.
