Opinion

WE NEED A MODERN APOLLO PROGRAM

NASA is in a bit of trouble right now.

You’d hardly know it. Right now, as you read this, seven astronauts are circling the Earth hundreds of miles over your head. They are performing very delicate surgery on the multi-billion dollar Hubble Space Telescope, and they’re doing stellar work.

When they’re done, the previously ailing Hubble will be back, and better than ever. It’ll have two new cameras on board, two older cameras fixed, and a slew of new hardware all designed to keep the ‘scope running for at least another five years, and maybe more.

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At the same time, the Kepler mission has started its science program, staring at a patch of space studded with 100,000 stars, looking for signs of planets circling those distant suns, including ones that are Earth-like. If it finds any, it will be the first time in all of history that we can point to another star and say: there’s a world there something like ours.

Cassini still orbits Saturn, returning one stunning image after another. Rovers still traverse the Martian surface, years after their warranties have expired. The Swift satellite recently saw the most distant single object in the Universe, a titanic explosion an incredible 13.1 billion light years away.

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Despite these astonishing achievements, NASA is floundering. The Space Shuttle program is waning. When the current mission touches down, only eight more flights of the birds will remain, the last in 2010. The replacement program, called Constellation, won’t launch until at least 2014, and more likely later. For at least four years, NASA won’t be able to launch a human into space without help from Russia, Europe, or just possibly private industry.

NASA had grand schemes of going to Mars by way of the Moon. But that was before the economic woes. Now, rumor has it these plans are being scaled back, with the permanent colony on the Moon turning into more of a scientific station that may or may not be visited regularly.

So what do we do? Some people say we should take NASA’s money and spend it on something else, something on Earth. But this is very short-sighted, and even wrong. That money is spent on Earth: salaries for engineers, scientists, and management; materials, transportation .ñ.ñ. NASA keeps a lot of folks employed one way or another.

Yet the space agency isn’t seeing much governmental love. Mike Griffin, NASA’s ex-Administrator, stepped down months ago. Rumors abound that President Obama will pick astronaut Charles Bolden to take the top spot, but that’s a decision that’s been five months in coming.

And NASA is a favorite for the Congressional chopping block, despite its operating cost being substantially less than 1% of the Federal budget. Cutting NASA’s budget is like looking for pennies in the sofa when you’ve got the air conditioning running and all your windows open. The US military spends NASA’s yearly budget every week.

Yet for that relative pittance NASA does so much. It has an impact on our daily lives. Throw away your visions of Tang and Teflon and Velcro; NASA didn’t invent them. But digital cameras owe their existence to Hubble; their light-sensitive chips can trace their lineage straight back to development of the detectors that went on board Hubble’s first generation of cameras.

But there’s so much more than just technology spin-offs. For all of history, the Moon was a metaphor for an unreachable place, beyond our grasp. But in 1969 NASA looked to this unachievable destination and made it achievable. It was an event so singular that every accomplishment ever since has been compared to it. It was NASA’s shining hour.

But I’ve met many Apollo astronauts, and — no offense to them — they’re old. The last man to walk on the Moon is 75. How old will he be when the next human leaves a footprint on the lunar surface?

NASA needs a modern Apollo. As a nation, we need it. In the late 1960s, our culture and our global reputation were crumbling. But for a few shining years we were the envy of the planet. And rightly so. We went to the Moon. NASA’s manned and unmanned programs have done incredible things since then, extending our knowledge of the solar system and the Universe to places we couldn’t fathom just decades ago. But can we take that next giant leap?

NASA is about exploration, and about science. Both of these need to push at the boundaries, or else they’ll stagnate and die.

I want NASA to push against the frontiers again. We should give NASA more money, not starve it of what little it gets now.

In a real sense NASA costs us very little, but it has the potential to give us the stars. We just need the will to reach out for them.

Dr. Philip Plait is an astronomer who has worked with the Hubble Telescope. He blogs at blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy