Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

394 reMeMBerINg the SpaCe age
perhaps, but not yet. twice this year I myself was thrilled to experience
anew the awe and wonder so many felt at the dawn of the Space age. the frst
experience was a stroll on the surface of Mars! I luckily visited NaSa headquarters
on May 17, the very day Dr. alfred Mcewen of the University of arizona
revealed “Mars as You’ve Never Seen Before,” courtesy of the Mars Orbiter
and phoenix rovers Spirit and Opportunity. the second experience a few weeks
later occurred while I was on a VIp tour of JpL courtesy of Blaine Baggett, who
is producing a documentary for the 50th anniversary of explorer 1, america’s
frst satellite. Pace howard McCurdy (whose brilliant analysis of robots consigns
them to the dying industrial age of human culture), I marveled at the magical
robotic spacecraft designed and assembled in the hills above pasadena. It is they
who have made what Carl Sagan called the golden age of planetary exploration;
and it is they who bear witness to what Samuel Florman called “the existential
pleasures of engineering.” Yet I also watched troop after troop of children on
school feld trips to JpL and could not help but wonder whether it made any
impression on them. Can youth today feel the tingle that homer hickam felt the
night Sputnik passed over West Virginia? Or have today’s kids been so jaded by
the far more spectacular virtual reality of Nintendo and Dreamworks that NaSa
cannot compete? Or will the excitement of virtual reality instead render brilliant
young people impatient to accelerate the human thrust into space?
On young people—and the future—I have no authority to speak. But as
an historian with some authority to pronounce on the past 50 years, I would
suggest that the trajectory spacefight has taken refects the fact that the nation
that drove the enterprise, the United States, has been perversely burdened by
its responsibilities as defender of most of the world and is perversely ill-suited
to what spacefight requires. Not as ill-suited as that fraudulent technocracy,
the Soviet Union, but ill-suited nonetheless. given the costs, lead-times, and
distances involved, the pioneering of space requires a coherent, sustainable, longterm
approach, predictably fnanced and supported by a patient people willing
to sacrifce and delay gratifcation even over a generation or more. americans
do not ft that description. Likewise (and I defer here to political scientists such
as John Logsdon) the U.S. government does not exactly ft the description of a
streamlined technocracy, given its checks and balances, contesting parties, rival
bureaucracies, frequent elections and personnel turnovers, mixed public and
private sectors, gigantic distractions both foreign and domestic, and reliance
in all cases on a meandering, manipulable public opinion. Indeed, given those
handicaps and the mistakes and false starts bound to occur in a venture of such
scope and novelty, perhaps Sir arthur C. Clarke was correct when he recently
said, all disappointment aside, that a great deal has been accomplished in the frst
50 years of the Space age. Not least, I would stress, the cosmic advances in space
science which, so far at least, have been strangely ignored in our proceedings.
Will the United States continue to dominate humanity’s agenda in space?
Or will we pass the baton to others, such as several countries in asia? Or will