I’ve long considered manned space travel a dead-end. I suppose it comes from the fact that the Challenger disaster had burned itself into my memory as a child. I remember being stunned by the images coming back from the Voyagers at Jupiter and Saturn and getting my mind around the fact that those were whole other worlds. We could go such fascinating places with machines, but getting humans off the planet was obviously a costly, dangerous and futile proposition.
I could bolster that argument with the tragedies of Apollo 13, Skylab and recently, the shuttle Columbia. And for many years, I did.
A friend of mine has a similar passion for worlds beyond this one. He’s an avid follower of NASA’s history and endeavors, and he’s all for a series of return missions to the moon. Of course, my reaction was to argue as I have for quite awhile, that it’s simply impractical.
My own arguments gave me pause, however. I can argue all I want that it may be costly and fraught with peril, but what does that make me? What does it make all of us?
I can only wonder at the spirit and strength of men like Armstrong, Glenn and Aldrin. I find myself wondering if my own arguments are indicative of what my generation has become. Have we lost our sense of adventure and enterprise? Have we lost our courage and justified that loss with pragmatism and cynicism?
I will admit with a slight cringe that I belong to the group that allowed itself to be branded “Generation X.” We grew up in the Cold War under the shadow of nuclear paranoia and we were the first batch to be reared on the overwhelming jump-cut barrage of imagery that masquerades as entertainment on television and the radio. We emerged into a job market in which a college diploma was no guarantee of a decent job, and we were told never to expect any of the money back that we spent on Social Security. We haven’t generated any great composers or authors, largely because we believe it’s futile.
And man, did quite a few of us bitch about it. We can joke about the navel-gazing self-absorption of the Baby Boomers, but we were just as bad, only with a larger dose of self-pity.
Now we’re all grown up. We work through our days without much passion, then we go home and watch the same old crap on TV and wonder how we got this way. Before you think I’m casting stones, I’ve caught myself thinking and doing all of the above at some point.
Somewhere down the line, we just got numb. What does it really mean to be American in the 21st century? It can’t have changed this much. We can’t let it. This nation was founded on a Revolution. All the major questions on human rights have been dragged into the light and settled here. We saved the world from itself in 1945, and dammit, we once put men on the moon.
Now I see why it’s important that we go back. Let’s make the jump to Mars if we can. It isn’t really about research, and it’s certainly not about economics or politics. It’s about reaching without stopping to worry about exceeding our grasp.
We’ve grown used to wonders in this century. It’s hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We’ve grown used to the idea of space, and, perhaps we forget that we’ve only just begun. We’re still pioneers.
—Ronald Reagan 01/28/86