The space age is so yesterday.
Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, went for his historic stroll a month before Woodstock. The last of the dozen men to walk on the lunar surface left his footprints in the grey dust in December of 1972.
In 2011, describing something as having been made of “space age” materials would be to pronounce it as hopelessly retrograde.
The space shuttle, the successor to NASA’s lunar program, was launched in April of 1981.
That would have been a question worth asking a few decades ago. Instead, we just continued to send the shuttle up into low orbit, charging its crew with esoteric and unimaginably expensive experiments.
For years now, we’ve been asking questions in this space about the shuttle program. Anyone who remembers or knows anything about the history of the space program has likely done the same.
We won World War II. We won the space race. We won the Cold War. Can we move onto the new millennium now?
The Apollo program, which brought astronauts to the moon, was exhilarating. The successor shuttle, had it lived up to its hype – it was supposed to be inexpensive, able to be turned around and relaunched in no time – might not have been uninteresting. And the successor to that, which ought to have begun decades ago, might have been absolutely and literally fantastic.
Instead, our nation is about to retire the shuttle and NASA has no real plans for the future. Imagine a youngster, a few years from now, asking the reason for the shuttle. And why it lasted so long. Good luck answering.
Before we take another small step toward another giant leap, we have got to know what we are doing, and why we are doing it.