Obama: Inspiration Lost in Space

by Thomas Gangale
16 June 2008

According to Senator Barack Obama, "NASA is no longer associated with inspiration." If so, I wonder why NASA websites have scored billions of visits while the rovers Spirit and Opportunity have traveled across the surface of Mars.

Senator Obama has also said, "I do think that our program has been stuck for a while - that the space shuttle mission did not inspire the imagination of the public."

What could be more uninspiring than a program that boldly goes where hundreds have gone before? What's the mission we're flying next? STS-124... STS-125... or is that the number of sheep I've been counting as the space program has been putting me to sleep? Yes, the space shuttle program is boring, but it was designed to be. It was supposed to provide routine access to space, and except for the losses of Challenger and Columbia, it's been pretty routine. STS-126... STS-127.... are we inspired yet? The most famous astronaut in recent times is Lisa Nowak.

The space shuttle program was so uninspiring from the very beginning that NASA wasn't even inspired enough to give it a name like Apollo. But then, the American public was already bored with the Apollo program by the time an oxygen tank exploded on the third lunar landing mission. As Marilyn Lovell remarked when the Apollo 13 crisis erupted, the media hadn't cared that her husband was going to land on the Moon, but suddenly cared that he wasn't going to land on the Moon. And Jim Lovell was one of the men who had captivated the world by reading from Genesis on Christmas Eve only a year and a half earlier as Apollo 8 orbited the Moon.

So, I can forgive Senator Obama for sounding like Kurt Cobain when talking about the space program: "Here we are now, entertain us!" It's not just a Generation X thing.

However, it's curious that Americans are looking to him for inspiration while he is looking to the space program for inspiration and not finding it. It's also curious that his proposed cure is to make the patient sicker. He plans to delay Project Constellation--a space program with a real name and real destinations to the Moon and Mars--for at least five years, putting the saved money into a new $10-billion-a-year education program. President Bush has already killed the space shuttle program to help pay for the Constellation program, and with a President Obama, we may not have that either. This is of special concern to California in view of its large aerospace industry, including the prime contractor for the Orion spacecraft, Sunnyvale-based Lockheed Martin.

With space shuttle flights ending in 2010, and the first Constellation mission not scheduled until 2014, American astronauts face a planned four-year gap during which they'll be forced to hitch rides with the Russians--or even the Chinese--to get to and from the International Space Station, which is mostly American. That's a bad plan to begin with because development programs always slip a couple of years. As a new program, the space shuttle was supposed to fly in 1978; its first mission wasn't until 1981. So, I'll bet that even if fully funded, Constellation will fly no earlier than 2016. An Obama administration would add another five years to the delay, so it could be eleven years between the last space shuttle mission and the first Constellation flight.

The only thing more uninspiring than the space shuttle program would be no manned space flights at all, and on the Obama plan, that's what the next generation of American youth will get. We're already calling them Generation Z. Zzzzz.

Getting back to education, let's do some math. Senator Obama proposes to fund a new $10-billion-a-year education program by cutting back the $2.5-billion-a-year Constellation program. OK, and I suppose I can pay my $10,000 federal income tax bill with a check for $2,500? People's eyes glaze over when hearing about billions of dollars, so let's scale down to everyone's everyday experiences. Today, the federal government will spend $26.21 of my taxes. The entire NASA budget will cost me $0.16. I can afford that.

In an era of secretive government, the best-kept secret is how inexpensive the space program is. Polls taken over the decades consistently show that a majority of Americans overestimate NASA's share of the federal budget at anywhere from five percent to 25 percent. Would you believe it's only six-tenths of a percent? It's the best deal in the solar system.

I hope that this won't be viewed as a hit piece against Senator Obama, but as a friendly nudge, and I hope that he will understand that nothing could give a bigger boost to education than an inspiring space program. In the Apollo years, the number of students graduating with advanced degrees skyrocketed (no pun intended), and the nation has reaped the benefits of that Apollo inspiration throughout the decades of their productive lives.

Let's give the next generation something other than violent video games and other virtual-world fantasies for their entertainment. Let's inspire them to excel with a vision of the future that promises peaceful adventures on many worlds.