Uncle Rod's Astro Blog

About a year ago, I wrote an entry, “Goodnight Moon,” that expressed my disappointment with the Obama Administration’s decision to, as I saw it, shut down NASA’s manned spaceflight program(s). What Obama wanted to do was put the development of new spacecraft, both for low earth orbit, LEO, and for deep space missions (missions other than to the ISS) in the hands of private enterprise.

I wasn’t too happy, despite the fact that NASA has not exactly had an unblemished record over the last thirty years. They’ve often been willing to give in to the demands of politicians for “more for less.” At times, it’s seemed as if NASA’s prime directive has not been to explore the Final Frontier, but to keep NASA’s workforce gainfully employed. Employed in programs so cash-starved they accomplish little. Those of y’all who know me will testify that I’ve been one of the Agency’s harshest critics when they’ve deserved it.

No, the Shuttle did not work out as originally planned. It fell short of our dreams of a space moving-van, an orbital C-130. The ISS hasn’t been even a partial success. It’s a huge white elephant that gobbles money like peanuts while not advancing a program of exploration or engaging the public. It has never had a clearly defined mission of any kind, and apparently wasn’t designed to.

But NASA hasn’t always deserved criticism, even in its latter Shuttle days. The Hubble Space Telescope alone is almost enough to justify thirty years of dithering around in LEO. Leaving aside the disappointments in the human spaceflight program, unmanned mission after unmanned mission, from Viking to New Horizons, has advanced our knowledge of the Great Out There tremendously.

If blame can be placed at the doorstep in Houston, it’s that, as above, for too long NASA has been content to go along to get along. Instead of telling the politicians “We simply cannot do it for the money you are giving us; we’ll have to forget the whole thing,” NASA has always folded, promising to somehow accomplish the mission with too little money in too compromised a fashion.

The ironic thing? In the last few years, it almost appeared as if NASA had shaken off its malaise. There was a new excitement brewing with plans for a new manned spaceflight system, “Constellation,” which would be capable of undertaking missions to both the ISS and beyond. That “beyond” being the Moon. Wonder of wonders, NASA was actually and finally making plans to return to Luna.

I don’t know about y’all, but the continuing mystery to me has always been why NASA has been too timid to advance the idea of a return to the Moon. If you are (supposedly) interested in sending men and women farther than LEO someday, maybe on to Mars, returning to the Moon is a natural. Not only is it close and relatively easy and an excellent training ground for more ambitious deep space missions, it, contrary to what the more ignorant pundits and even some people who should know better will tell you, is an outstanding end in itself.

Science-wise, it’s laughable to say, as some of the ignorant and biased will, “been there, done that.” We’ve barely been there and done very almost nothing. We’ve explored too tiny a fraction of the Moon’s surface to say we’ve really explored it at all. The Moon is a world, a still mysterious one, and the more we learn about it, the more complex and interesting it becomes. It’s now evident that the good old boring Moon is a repository of a wealth of minerals—and even water. Water that could not just support a Lunar colony, but fuel ships departing the Moon’s rocket-friendly gravity well for more distant ports of call.

The plans to go back lasted just barely through Year One of the current Administration’s tenure. Despite some noises during the campaign about supporting manned spaceflight, Obama soon let the axe fall. The Constellation Program would be cancelled. Private contractors would design and field manned spacecraft to ferry crews to the ISS. The deep space part of NASA’s plans? The return to the Moon was cancelled. The heavy lift booster was cancelled. Maybe (at some future time) a heavy lifter would be developed to take us beyond Earth orbit to some place. Not the Moon. Probably not Mars. Maybe to an asteroid or something. It was made clear, however, that that was just a “maybe.”

“But Uncle Rod, private companies built NASA’s Apollo, Gemini, and Mercury spacecraft. Why can’t they do that again?” They have never stopped. Private industry, private contractors, built the Shuttle and every other U.S. space system. To NASA’s designs and missions. What Obama proposes is that NASA be taken out of the loop. That private companies, with government help, build spacecraft to their own specifications. Man-rated spacecraft.

Me? I think I’d want NASA in the same capacity they’ve always been in, overseeing and managing contractors. If NASA hasn’t always managed perfectly, fix that rather than throw out both the dadgummed baby and the bathwater. Which is just what has been done. What Obama decided was that we’d scrap a system, Constellation, already far along, four years along, in its development and start from scratch, wasting billions to switch horses to an as yet un-designed “something.”

NASA’s future role under the Obama plan? To supply astronauts. Probably. Other than that? Difficult for me to say exactly what NASA will be doing. The Agency’s new administrator, Charles Bolden, however, thinks he knows. In a widely-publicized interview, he offered that NASA’s FOREMOST mission is not to explore the Great Out There, but to improve relations with the Muslim world. There’s nothing wrong with Muslims; I’d feel the same if Bolden had said NASA’s foremost mission is to improve relations with Baptists. NASA’s foremost mission should be to get us off this stinking rock.

Of course I have no doubt some of y’all probably wonder why we should worry about venturing off this planet, at least sending humans off this planet, anyway. Even some amateur astronomers of my acquaintance are strongly against human spaceflight. I reckon they just don’t get it that, in the long term (and I know us Americans don’t much like thinking about that pea-picking Long Term), moving humans off planet means the survival of the human race—if you fancy such a thing desirable, which I sometimes doubt of late. But there are other reasons, too. Reasons that have nothing to do with keeping folks in Florida and Texas employed.

One other reason was eloquently stated by Leo Szilard in his recollection of what his fellow physicist, Otto Mandl, said one day,

He thought he knew what it would take to save mankind from a series of recurring wars that could destroy it. He said that man has a heroic streak in himself. Man is not satisfied with a happy idyllic life; he has the need to fight and encounter danger. And he concluded that what mankind must do to save itself is to launch an enterprise aimed at leaving the earth. On this task he thought the energies of mankind could be concentrated and the need for heroism could be satisfied.

Do we spend too much money on space? We spend far more than the entire NASA budget on foolish and ephemeral things that I won’t waste your time enumerating here. The public doesn’t realize that, though. In a recent poll a random sample of adults was asked to estimate the percentage of the budget consumed by NASA. The responses averaged out to 25%. The actual figure is .60%. Yes, that is a decimal in front of the six.

Weren’t Mom and Pop once more educated about and more excited about space? Yes. Yes indeed. Will you indulge me for a minute and let me tell you what it was like growing up in the A-OK days?

I’m hard put to give you youngsters a feel for the excitement in the air when the Space Age was aborning, back in the early 1960s. We’d suddenly gone from stark, staring fear when the Soviets put that beeping Sputnik of theirs in orbit, to elation as Shepard and then Grissom and Glenn lifted off in their Mercury spacecraft. Yes, we were behind the Russkies, but no longer way behind. The sky was now the limit. Heck, our young President said we were going to the Moon and at least implied that would be just the beginning. But still we worried. Major Glenn went up for a few orbits, the Soviets went for dozens.

Much of the concern about the U.S. lagging behind in the SPACE RACE was focused on us kids. We were not, the old folks worried, getting enough math and science in school. That had to be remedied. And soon. Suddenly, even down here in benighted Possum Swamp, the dollars began to flow into the schools. Our teachers made heroic efforts to impress upon us the importance of this New Frontier, and make sure we were up to speed not just on our math and science, but on the doings of America’s Space Agency. Math, science, space. Lots of it. Throw me into that briar patch, Brer Fox.

In elementary school, that resulted not just in us doing lots of “science units” on astronomy/space, but our teachers getting into the swim of the latest educational innovations designed to pull America’s supposedly math-science ignorant kids up by our bootstraps. It was heady stuff for the Rodster to suddenly go from covering and re-covering fractions and long division with Old Miss Alsabrook in the fifth grade to the New Math with pretty Miss Stinson in the sixth. This New Math with its set theory and modular arithmetic was fascinating stuff. I loved it.

Yes, we were being drilled in math and science furiously. The name of our nation’s new agency, NASA (reconstituted from the old NACA), was on our teachers’ lips daily, and one of the new TVs the school had been able to buy with the influx of federal dollars was invariably wheeled into our classroom for every single Mercury launch. But outer space was not something you only heard about in school.

The Great Out There was all over TV. At first in the form of the previous decade’s space movies, like Forbidden Planet, Destination Moon, and The Conquest of Space, which were suddenly more popular than they’d been when they were new. These films were not just more popular, their tales of space spanning journeys had gone from pie-in-the-sky in the fifties to just-around-the-corner in the sixties.

There were even some attempts made—usually with the cooperation of NASA—to go beyond the made-for-TV foolishness like Rocky Jones, Space Ranger to original and serious depictions of the New Frontier on the boob tube. In particular there was Men Into Space, a short-lived but (I thought) wonderful show that looked like Chesley Bonestell paintings come to life.

Of course our hunger for space wasn’t just assuaged by hard-core nuts and bolts programs. The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling’s initially often well done science fiction/fantasy anthology series had some space-centric episodes, with little Unk’s fave being “Where is Everybody?” Serling’s final narration for this outing gave me chills . It had such an enervating effect on li’l Rod that Mama became concerned I was having some sort of fit. In fact, it still has that wonderful effect on me to this day:

Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is the sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting. Waiting with the patience of eons. Forever waiting...in the Twilight Zone.

Well I remember me and Mama sitting and shivering as The Twilight Zone’s sometimes frightening little tales unwound. But it wasn’t all scary stuff. Space could be funny, too. If you’ve seen the film The Right Stuff, you know about Alan Shepard’s silly but funny impression of (non Hispanic) Bill Dana as the frightened “Jose the Astronaut.” Dana’s routine, which would hardly be politically correct today, took the country by storm, and Dana soon leapt from comedy record albums to TV, where Jose would, after being asked if he were going into orbit soon, drawl, “Oh, I hope not.”

In the early days, the Mercury Seven, the original seven Astronauts, were almost demigods, and I had no idea that my astronaut, Alan Shepard, loved Jose as much as I did. Yeah, “my astronaut.” Back in those innocent times, most of us kids had a favorite astronaut. I was torn. John Glenn was a Marine, and that made him especially cool. And he’d been the first American to orbit the Earth. But Alan Shepard was the first American man in space. I had been so impressed when my second grade class watched the flight of Freedom Seven, the vision of the mighty Redstone lifting off was so imprinted on my little mind, that I had to throw my allegiance to Shepard.

Thus we come to the catchword of the day, A-OK. That was supposedly what astronauts pronounced when everything on the mission was going good, when that Right Stuff was really ginned up. Apparently, none of the astronauts ever actually said “A-OK,” but no matter. Kids picked up on it big-time, and soon everything was A-OK.

I can remember nearly driving Mama bugs one Saturday morning as we drove downtown to Dauphin Street for one of her epic shopping trips. Li’l Rod’s response to every question she asked me that morning was “A-OK!” Which I kept up till Mama inevitably lost her cool, threatening to “Turn this car around right now, MISTER, and drop you at Granny’s for the day.” That calmed me down as that penalty would mean missing out on buying a SPACE TOY of some kind on the toy aisle of S.H. Kress’ five-and-dime store.

What did I get there? There was plenty to choose from. The toy merchants had picked up on the space craze, and the shelves were groaning with everything from reissues of tired old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers rayguns, to wonderful new things like the amazing PROJECT X-500 launch center and the Marx Cape Canaveral playsets. Those were very expensive—five or ten dollars—so they were the stuff of birthdays, if not Christmas. Usually what I could hope for would be a bag of the old Multiple Plastics Company’s spacemen, maybe accompanied by a little ship of some kind.

In a few years, the toy companies would be issuing recognizable Mercury and Gemini capsules with abandon, but at first it was enough to sell something-anything that looked vaguely like a rocketship, even if its appearance had more to do with the Nike air defense missiles that would supposedly protect some of us from incoming Soviet Bear bombers than it did with outer space.

But that was A-OK; I didn’t need much to fire my imagination. If Mama was wise enough to run me through Kress before hitting Lerner’s dress shop and our fancy department store, Gayfer’s, she could be assured I’d be compliant and quiet for the rest of the trip, with my astronauts busily exploring these uber-boring establishments, which had magically metamorphosed into the sands of Mars or the frigid wastes of a distant asteroid.

One particularly sweet birthday, Mama and Daddy presented me with a cake topped by a plastic rocket that looked a lot like one of the Von Braun wonders I’d seen in Disney’s Man in Space when it played at the Roxy. I once again nearly drove Mama to distraction “orbiting” from the living room to the kitchen and back, all the while BEEPING like a Sputnik. The little Boxer pup that wandered up and that Mama and Daddy let me keep? I insisted on naming him “Satellite.”

The point of these reminiscences? Just that one of the roadblocks we space enthusiasts face is the public’s seeming disinterest in spaceflight. What powered Apollo was not or not just Von Braun’s massive engines, but the palpable and far reaching public excitement (well, with a little fear of the Russkies and good, old fashioned American competitiveness thrown in). How do we get that back? The public must be led to space. Educated about it. Excited with a vision of the future.

Where do we stand with that in this year 2011, which was supposed to be the wonderful space-borne future when I was a sprout? I was half listening to the President’s State of the Union speech the other night. I am not a big fan of the political malarkey that infuses these events, whichever party is in power, but I was curious whether Obama, like most of his predecessors would mention the space program, at least in passing. I was doubtful, so I almost fell off my chair when the President intoned:

Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon. The science wasn't even there yet. NASA didn't exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn't just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.

If a more space friendly President takes office? That could change, but the cancellation of the Constellation Project means so much ground has been lost and so much money wasted that it will be a long, hard slog to return to where we were two years ago—and that assumes an Administration and Congress and a NASA very serious about manned exploration.

Next Time: Charity Hope Valentine confronts the Herschel 400!