Published: July 23, 2009 08:26 am      

Nations’s manned space program lacks a mission

The Eagle-Tribune, North Andover, Mass.

On July 20, 1969, American astronaut Neil Armstrong took "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" and strode onto the surface of the moon.

In the 40 years since that giant leap, America's manned space program has produced little more than a series of stumbles.

To be certain, our country has produced some magnificent machines — the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station. The technological prowess behind the shuttle and the station is clear. But what they lack is a purpose.

When President John F. Kennedy announced in the early 1960s that America would land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, the nation, for the most part, supported that mission. In the middle of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had humiliated the United States with its early space successes. We needed to prove that the United States would not "cede the high ground" to the Soviet empire.

So the best and brightest from the military and civilian worlds signed on to be the astronauts and engineers of the Apollo program. They overcame enormous technological hurdles and the tragic loss of three astronauts in a fire during a test run on the launch pad. They met President Kennedy's challenge and planted the American flag on the moon.

Now what?

After six moon landings and the harrowing adventure of Apollo 13, enthusiasm for the space program dried up. Three final Apollo missions were canceled.

The manned space program became less about getting to other worlds and more about the important things we could do right here in earth orbit.

The shuttle was meant to be a kind of space truck — cheap, reusable, dependable — that would provide routine access to space. The shuttle proved reusable but never cheap. The loss of two of our five shuttles along with their crews proved space flight would never be routine.

The shuttle was key to the construction of the International Space Station, which was to be a laboratory in space where all sorts of important technological breakthroughs would be discovered. The space station has yet to deliver on that promise. Astronauts spend their time aboard accomplishing little more than the Russians did a decade ago on Mir.

Forty years after our greatest space triumph, we are on the verge of not being able to get a person into space at all.

The last shuttle flight is scheduled for next year. After that, we will have to depend on our one-time rivals the Russians to carry us, like so much excess baggage, to the space station.

The station itself has a bleak future. After a decade of construction at a cost of nearly $100 billion, the station finally will be complete next year. Yet NASA last week announced plans to deorbit the station — guide it on a controlled crash into the Pacific — in 2016 due to a lack of funding for its continued operation.

The next American manned spacecraft — an Apollo-like capsule rather than a shuttle-type aircraft — won't be ready until late in the next decade.

There is some vague idea that we're going to return to the moon or perhaps go to Mars. But vague ideas don't produce Neil Armstrong's giant steps.

America's manned space program needs a mission that the public will rally behind and support. Without it, we aren't going anywhere.