On Saturday, NASA launched a one-ton, nuclear-powered mobile laboratory into space, beginning a long trip to the beautiful Red Planet, Mars.
Just a few months after the final space shuttle launch, this endeavor is as symbolically reassuring as it is scientifically exciting.
Many feared the retirement of space shuttles could portend the retirement of astronauts — in spite of President Barack Obama’s contrary assurances. But this robot landing is a big step in a bold new space agenda, with the goal of putting astronauts, someday, onto Mars.
Last year, with the shuttle program winding down, Obama called off lunar landing plans as well. We haven’t stepped onto the moon for almost 40 years now, and a possible return is quite exciting.
But to hear Obama tell it, calling off our storied space programs is a step forward, and not back.
NASA, the government agency responsible for some of mankind’s greatest moments, is meeting budget cuts by spending more, but differently. That strategy could serve us well in other programs, too.
All reasonable observers, in politics and economics, agree today that it is time to do things differently. But too many of these observers, and unfortunately a great portion of those with public platforms, seem to think that means it’s time to do things smaller.
From both extremes, and from most places in the middle, our leaders call to save, to skimp, to cut back. It’s a little vision, of a smaller, cheaper future, that we’re fighting over.
But in NASA, we have changed course to a plan that is much bigger.
In this country’s greatest moments, different has always meant big. Today’s high-tech economy was born from innovations in our first space quest, and built upon the infrastructure of great public works then decades old.
A trip to Mars may call for just that kind of different. Strange and distant, Mars is as far away in miles as it is close in dreams. To get there, we’ll need new technologies, the kind that trickle through society and set off waves of innovation. We’ll need scientists, leadership and most of all, a national commitment.
To explore the moon again, we’d use technology that’s been around for decades. But to reach Mars, we’ll need science that, to now, exists only in fiction.
If we require competition, Mars can satisfy us in that, too. These last few years have spawned a thousand pipers of American decline. We now have rivals, critics claim, in areas once seen as ours alone.
But up in space, America still reigns supreme. We are the only nation, though it’s been a while now, to put people on the surface of the moon. And we’re the only nation, NASA’s Colleen Hartman crowed early this week, that’s driven robots on the Martian surface.
Russia’s latest failed attempt, the Phobos-Grunt probe, hasn’t made it out of orbit, floating pitifully above us now and threatening, sometime soon, to crash back down.
Someday, we hope all nations will boldly go. But as of now, America is leading.
As it should be.
Reach the columnist at john.a.gaylord@asu.edu Click here to subscribe to the daily State Press newsletter.
