America in Space: An Ambivalent Future

Having grown up with the US space program (which celebrated the golden anniversary of Alan Shepard’s fight on May 5, 2011) and come of age when Apollo 11 touched the moon, I’m not sure how I feel about the final flight of Atlantis, which is writing the final chapter on the shuttle program and US spaceflight history.

In many ways it is like the final saddle-stitched (stapled) issue of Playboy. That was September 1985, and Madonna was on the cover. It appeared after Discovery launched several communications satellites in August on its next to last flight, and before the October flight of Atlantis, on the program’s second classified mission for the Department of Defense.

At the time I was ambivalent about the magazine’s change of bindery because not enough time had passed to see, understand, absorb, and appreciate its portent of coming changes in publishing technology, all of them driven by computers and their ability to communicate without paper. My feelings about the final shuttle flight are similar, but with a clearer   focus on what the future likely holds.

Succinctly, human space flight for exploration is over. Like aviation before it, spaceflight is a victim of its own success. It is now a business all about the bottom line. We are a half century past Teflon and Tang technology trickle-downs. Return on investment is what matters. Sending humans to do technology’s job increases the cost exponentially. Tomorrow’s space travelers will buy a ticket on Virgin Galactic, the Russians, or one of the nascent companies vying for the International Space Station cargo contract.

We are not the same nation once universally captivated by Project Mercury and, to increasingly lesser degrees, Gemini, Apollo, the shuttle, and the ISS, which may keep operating until 2028. In place of unified national pride is polarized, parochial partisanship focused on a single, narrowly defined self-interest. The only thing they share is a prime directive: My Way or the Highway.

Like publishing after Madonna proudly displayed the last staple, America will continue to explore space. Better make that maybe. The only people really interested in exploration are scientists and the companies that make money off of it. The government will still have to fund it, and given our shared debt and political intractability in agreeing on fair and balanced solutions to it, maybe the American era of space exploration is over.

The romantic in me sees an American one day stepping on the surface of Mars. The realist snorts no way! And the pragmatist in charge suggests that both sides should look at the national trends revealed over the past half century and project them into the future. Yes, it is an ambivalent frontier. — Scott Spangler