Two and a half months ago, in a paroxysm of sheared metal, and gouts of tortured ceramics and human flesh and bone, we lost another shuttle orbiter and its crew.
The title of this post has a dual meaning. Thankfully, the war is essentially over, and rather than writing about how we will (not might, but will) overcome this temporary diversion by a legion of soulless monsters who revel in destroying life, I can return to reflecting on the more long-term and significant issue of how to ultimately expand that life into the universe.
When it comes to space policy (as indeed, when it comes to policy in general) I tend to have a cynical and skeptical outlook. But even I harbored some frail hope that that dramatic event might result in a rethinking of our so-far disastrous approach to opening up the high frontier (assuming, with thin basis, that this was a national goal)–that it would be a sobering event to even the most jaded and crass arbiters of well-marbled pork that is our current space program.
Sadly, cynicism once again rules the day. This Florida Today article demonstrates amply that nothing has changed. The title is “Columbia disaster fails to inspire space policy.” And, as always, space policy fails to inspire me, or anyone who wants us to become a truly space-faring nation, in which trips to space are no more notable than trips across the Atlantic, or across the American continent.
Here’s another depressing example of the moribund state of policy thinking, even (or especially) post-Columbia. It is the Congressional testimony of one of the usual suspects, space policy “expert” Marcia Smith of the Library of Congress.
I’ve previously discussed and critiqued it here.
Here’s the problem. We just fought, and won, a war in less than a month.
We did so because many people believed that it was important to do so–that a failure would result in not just a loss of international prestige, but potentially massive loss of human life. Accordingly, they gave the effort the resources it required, and put in place incentives to ensure that the desired results would be achieved.
The military has its own pork-barrel problems, but it ultimately has a bottom line. If it fails in its mission, it can result in not only the death of members of the military, but perhaps the nation itself, so there is an ultimate check on the degree to which politics can determine decisions at the Pentagon.
It has accountability.
NASA is different.
Despite all the lofty speeches, the recitations of Lieutenant Magee’s poem, the solemn promises to build a new space program on the rent bodies of the dead astronauts, it’s clear that the only goal that is truly important in the space program, as always since the end of Apollo (and it was a significant goal then), is to ensure that the requisite jobs are delivered to the requisite Congressional districts.
No President will lose an election, and few, if any, Congresspeople will, if we haven’t made much progress in settling the high frontier. Indeed, the only election that I can think of in which space was an issue, it was a negative one. Senator Jack Schmitt, a scientist astronaut, lost his New Mexico Senate seat. His opponent’s motto? “What on earth has Jack Schmitt done for New Mexico?”
Even if the American people cared, we don’t even have any useful yardsticks by which to measure our progress in such an endeavor, at least not any that can be calibrated against other standards, others’ progress. When the people have had it drilled into them for decades that Space Is Hard, by the only entity provided with the funding needed to accomplish anything in that new environment, who is to gainsay it?
Space remains a monopoly of a state socialist enterprise, and one that ensures that there is no competition to shine any light on its lack of success, or even a definition of it. Until we recognize that as a problem, rather than a solution, and until we decide that actual achievement in space should take priority over which NASA center (if any) achieves it, and until we harness our natural qualities of flexibility and free enterprise that have made us so successful globally, in peace and war, our species, and life itself will continue to be tethered, on a very short leash, to the single planet on which it evolved.