As a child of the Seventies, I was raised on a steady diet of promises. Life is getting better all the time. The future holds untowards riches of happiness (assuming we don't get blown up before then). I watched the development of the space program with breathless intensity, looking forward to the next step. It seemed to be a relentless march towards the outer reaches of the galaxy:
- The Apollo project had brought a human presence to a foreign astral object for the first time. Though on hiatus, it was still considered a stepping stone to the future.
- The Voyager space probes had successfully launched and were speeding towards a destiny-laden rendesvous with the outer planets, something seemingly straight out of an Arthur C Clark story (of which others had come true already).
- Launching satellites for commercial applications was becoming profitable for the first time.
- Skylab, and the Soviet equivalent, were aloft and permanently manned stations in orbit.
- The Space Shuttle was under development and promised to make cheap, reliable orbital transit a reality.
I grew fat on my diet of hopes and promises. The loss of Skylab was unfortunate, but insignificant in the long run; it was simply a proof-of-concept for the real space station, which would be aloft and manned within a few years. We would return to the moon, and have a permanent presence there, by the nineties; we were to have humans on Mars by the new millennium. Still not quite as rapid as Kubrick's vision, but nevertheless promising, and well within the time frame of my expected career. I planned my trajectory to intersect with that design.
As is the case with the best-laid plans, they did not survive contact with reality. The cost of reaching orbit remained frustratingly high; the safety of the Space Shuttle remained significantly less than perfect; and the will of the American political establishment to build upon the successes of the Apollo program waned to a nadir. Reality is as reality dose, but the part that pains the most is the hindsight-fueled realization, now painfully obvious, that the entire Apollo program was simply a gratuitous piece of Cold-War era one-upmanship. The politicians supporting it never truly cared about boosting humanity's role in the cosmos, and as soon as the deed was done, the public's attention proved to be equally fickle. I, and many others, wasted years of our lives and much moral angst preparing ourselves for a future that never arrived. I still see advertisements for T-shirts saying "I want to GO" in the back of pop-sci magazines.
Now, with the Apollo astronauts well into their seventies, and the new generation of astronauts seeming more interested in pursuing illicit affairs with each other than exploring the cosmos, our national desire for space exploration is at an all-time low. The last finger-in-the-eye was the annoucement of Project Constellation, our half-assed attempt to go back to the future by resurrecting old Apollo components and falling back on our old non-sustainable throwaway spaceflight principles of the mid-twentieth-century. Could we be any less ambitious? Yes, we could, we could just cancel the space program outright. Painful as this would be, it would be more honest and merciful than what we have currently: a new generation of young folks being promised the moon, but who, in the end, will only wind up with cheese.
But then again, in the grand scheme of things, this betrayal fits in perfectly with our nation's history. We promised to help the Hmong if they fought for us in southeast Asia; they did, and they are still waiting for us to help them. Their naivete and faith in us is excruciating to behold. Similarly, the US promised to help the Shiites in 1991 if they revolted against Saddam Hussein . They did, believing our promises of assistance; but after they had done so, and at the peak of their power, they were betrayed by the US, who sold them out to curry political favor with Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The resulting massacre of Shiites explains, to a certain extent, the tenacity of the insurgency against American forces in Iraq to this day. And going back farther, one could point to the early days of the nation, in our (yes, "our") dealings with the native peoples of this continent. Political expediency has regularly been the driving factor of the day. The space program is simply another in a long list of broken promises.
