MW
09-26-2007, 08:06 PM
One Giant Leap, Followed by Decades of Baby Steps
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Next week on Oct. 4, it will be 50 years since Sputnik launched the world into the so-called space age.
Some space age. It has been 35 years since anybody was on the Moon, or more than 300 miles from Earth, for that matter. NASA says it will be 2020 before astronauts get back to the Moon, meaning that it will have taken twice as long this time from presidential declaration (Bush in 2003) to actual landing than the first time around, when President John F. Kennedy declared in 1961 that America would land on the Moon within the decade, and Apollo 11 launched eight years later. You are free to make your own guesses about Mars.
If you’re not a reporter covering the space program or a scientist who uses space instruments, you probably have never met anyone who has seen the curve of the Earth with his or her own eyes. It is as if the response to Christopher Columbus’s voyage had been confined to mapping the reefs off Spain.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
When Sputnik was launched, transforming what my parents thought of as an unhealthy obsession with science fiction and all things atomic or cosmic into the stuff of patriotic heroism, my friends and I already knew how the future was supposed to unfold: Arthur C. Clarke (Sir Arthur now), Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, among many others, had laid it all out in stories and novels that we stole from the local drug store: the space stations, the Moonbases and Mars colonies, the lonely asteroid prospectors, the nuclear wars back home, the eventual dispersal of humanity to far flung stars where Earth is only a dim legend.
The great space visionaries like Wernher von Braun, Robert H. Goddard, Hermann Oberth and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, as well as the men and women of NASA, all drank the same Kool-Aid. But NASA, as the current administrator Michael D. Griffin will be the first to tell you, works for the president. As a result, true believers over the ages have had to hitch their wagons to whatever political star is in vogue.
Sputnik was an almost accidental outgrowth of the arms race, as Matthew Brzezinski’s new history, “Red Moon Rising,” makes grippingly clear. Neither Nikita S. Khrushchev nor Dwight D. Eisenhower understood at first how important and ominous that little beeping ball orbiting the Earth was. After the United States reclaimed its missile manhood by landing men on the Moon, President Richard M. Nixon had no more use for the Apollo program.
Rest of the article HERE (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25cosm.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=science&adxnnlx=1190854967-etBNYsgNeBjoo7fkeLj5AA)
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Next week on Oct. 4, it will be 50 years since Sputnik launched the world into the so-called space age.
Some space age. It has been 35 years since anybody was on the Moon, or more than 300 miles from Earth, for that matter. NASA says it will be 2020 before astronauts get back to the Moon, meaning that it will have taken twice as long this time from presidential declaration (Bush in 2003) to actual landing than the first time around, when President John F. Kennedy declared in 1961 that America would land on the Moon within the decade, and Apollo 11 launched eight years later. You are free to make your own guesses about Mars.
If you’re not a reporter covering the space program or a scientist who uses space instruments, you probably have never met anyone who has seen the curve of the Earth with his or her own eyes. It is as if the response to Christopher Columbus’s voyage had been confined to mapping the reefs off Spain.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
When Sputnik was launched, transforming what my parents thought of as an unhealthy obsession with science fiction and all things atomic or cosmic into the stuff of patriotic heroism, my friends and I already knew how the future was supposed to unfold: Arthur C. Clarke (Sir Arthur now), Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, among many others, had laid it all out in stories and novels that we stole from the local drug store: the space stations, the Moonbases and Mars colonies, the lonely asteroid prospectors, the nuclear wars back home, the eventual dispersal of humanity to far flung stars where Earth is only a dim legend.
The great space visionaries like Wernher von Braun, Robert H. Goddard, Hermann Oberth and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, as well as the men and women of NASA, all drank the same Kool-Aid. But NASA, as the current administrator Michael D. Griffin will be the first to tell you, works for the president. As a result, true believers over the ages have had to hitch their wagons to whatever political star is in vogue.
Sputnik was an almost accidental outgrowth of the arms race, as Matthew Brzezinski’s new history, “Red Moon Rising,” makes grippingly clear. Neither Nikita S. Khrushchev nor Dwight D. Eisenhower understood at first how important and ominous that little beeping ball orbiting the Earth was. After the United States reclaimed its missile manhood by landing men on the Moon, President Richard M. Nixon had no more use for the Apollo program.
Rest of the article HERE (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25cosm.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=science&adxnnlx=1190854967-etBNYsgNeBjoo7fkeLj5AA)