ATLANTIS SHUTTLE

“Is the Space Program … Going up in Smoke”?

While watching the last shuttle launch of Atlantis today, July 8, 2011, it caused huge flutters to my inner soul.

As a boy of seven watching on a black & white television, I vividly remember the 1957 launch of Sputnik and the Russians opening the frontier of outer-space. Only four years later in 1961, came the moving announcement of President Kennedy telling our nation, while we were in fear of nuclear holocaust that America was going to put a man on the moon within the decade. There was hope, faith and pride that we could do anything and would, we were second to none!

But the tremor in my heart today now asks, will my grandkids look back fifty years from now and write about hearing President Obama telling Brazil to drill for oil and we will be your biggest customers? Will they remember it was Obama that saw wisdom to disband and dismantle NASA and our space program and let Russia ferry our astronauts into space. Or that a plethora of “trade-agreements” will one day soon prove fatal to our once proud industrial manufacturing might in the world.

Will we soon regret taking our trillions of dollars investment in the space and new technology frontier and have flush them into museums for generations to gawk at the remains of what was once a great nation? Are these great shuttle air ships nothing more today than the symbol of dinosaur bones of years past?

Where once this nation went from a key on the end of a kite to power plants lighting the world are we moving forward or are we headed to a society fraught with total equality for everyone, where we become a third-world nation of poverty and despair? With unemployment over 9% and a national debt of over $14 trillion dollars have we already become a welfare nation because of the ineptitude of leadership?

I project we will know well within this decade the path we have chosen. Will NASA find new life in a private sector of new endeavors reaching even higher vistas and creating comparable achievements of the past such as the “ball-point pen”, “Tang”, the “Micro-wave oven” or computer technology? Only our kids may write the next chapter.

Is corruption in politics so rampant with special interests and special deals that this proposed new private sector space program will invariably create the next GE, FannyMae, Goldman Sacks or AT&T conglomerates of the future? Where unfathomable corporations control so much of the wealth and power of this nation that corruption becomes there mantel instead of innovation and achievement.

It’s not inconceivable, I remember we broke up the telephone “Bell Systems” feeling it created monopolies that were detrimental to our nation, only to see them all come together through mergers and legislation into an even bigger dominant powerful lobbying structure. Was that the plan all along with the demise of NASA? Will a few select individuals end up in control of what were once one of our nation’s proudest assets and achievements only to offer so much less at an ever increasing cost?

Let me close this post by combining a couple of lines in the first paragraph from President Kennedy’s speech?

“If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny … Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in (space) achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.”