OLD GLORY ON MARS: I'm a very big fan of space exploration and, ultimately, exploitation and colonization. I'm a very big cynic about NASA. Waiting for NASA to get me into space is like waiting for the DMV to get me into a Ferrari 246.
Nevertheless, February 1 marks five years since we lost six good Americans and one fine Israeli on Columbia. This is what I wrote as a memorial, back on the old blog. I think it holds up alright:
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I was happily gestating when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon and, for most of my life, I’ve joked that there were two things I wanted to see in my life: Old Glory on Mars and new pavement in Berkeley. Neither was going to happen, so I always wished for both. Last week, I drove back from my brother-in-law’s house and saw new road work on Hearst Street and I found myself rather depressed.
I would have preferred Old Glory.
But since yesterday morning, as sad as I am for the loss of Columbia and her crew, I find myself bristling with hope. Yes, we want to know what happened and we want to fix the problem. We think of the families and friends. But the public demands, on the networks, on the street, in conversations with my less space-focused friends have not been practical: Who Failed? Who is to Blame? What Did They Miss? but quite romantic: Where To? When Are We Going? What’s Next?
And I thought of what Deacon Matson says to Rod Walker in Robert Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky:
“I’m telling you straight: I think you were born in the wrong age.”
“Sir?”
“I think you are a romantic. Now this is a very romantic age, so there is no room in it for romantics; it calls for practical men. A hundred years ago you would have made a banker or lawyer or professor and you could have worked out your romanticism by reading fanciful tales and dreaming about what you might have been if you hadn’t had the misfortune to be born in a humdrum period. But this happens to be a period when adventure and romance are a part of daily existence. Naturally it takes very practical people to cope with it.”
Today, we have quite the opposite problem. This is a practical age begging for romance. We are living in Heinlein’s hundred years-ago, Rod Walker’s regression. The world is lousy with practical problems. Like it or not, this planet is going to spend the next few years fighting, in one fashion or another, over freedom and oil, tyranny and dirt. Africa is dying of disease. Millions live under tyranny in China, the Middle East and Cuba. We fight these problems, but it often requires the most naive optimism to find the will to win. Many good Democrats – Truman and Kennedy – were practical men who contained communism and held us back from the brink. President Reagan was a romantic who saw that the Soviet Union could be pushed. Many good Democrats were practical folks who saw AIDS as the problem it is years before the Republicans could even say the word “condom” helped stemmed the tide. I think President Bush, at least in Africa, is a romantic to believe the disease can be ended before it claims a hundred million people, but I think it could tip the scales between staunching the wound and curing the problem.
Since the Nixon Administration, the NASA Administration has been practical – good people, some known, most unsung. Scientists like Ed Stone, astronauts like Kathleen Sullivan, achieving important things, yes, the Shuttle, Voyager, Galileo, Hubble – but without a purpose, without an ultimate human purpose. Budgets and bureaucratic imparatives. The space station exists largely to give the space shuttle something to do, after all. What it does is very cool, but it's practical... humdrum.
But in the two days since Columbia, Americans seem to be asking the right questions, the questions that push us truly further. For fifty years, engineers could tell us how to get to Mars. But people need to tell the politicians and the contractors why. If one good thing is coming out of Columbia and the loss of her crew, it’s that we're ready to tell our politicians: because we can, because it’s there, because we’re Americans. We should go to Mars, because it’s silly and defeatist to think we shouldn’t. I see it in the pride of the good folks in Texas, finding and guarding the debris – their debris -- from their space program, but only asking: What Next? Where To? How Long? Pundits and newscasters reporting on an important story, but asking an optimistic When? Not a horrified Why?
Perhaps it was the visuals – if this had been a space station mission, the shuttle would have come and broken up over over Central America, the Yucatan and the Gulf of Mexico, not Texas and Louisiana. And I think America would have reacted very differently indeed. We would never have seen a thing, not astronauts in their last vibrant moments, no doubt trying to solve the problem long after it was hopeless. Instead we'd have been left with the images of a Coast Guard cutter looking for the dead and newscasters pleasing themselves with cheap, predictable ironies about the Columbia 7 dying just miles from the impact which killed the dinosaurs.
But we saw what happened, we know it was a tile problem (if that’s not yet confirmed... it will be) and we already know why, and we don't need the punditry to dwell on the practical, the mundane. We will bury our astronauts, we will put their names on the memorial, and we will begin to figure out what’s next for space. And we will live to make them proud.
Let us not apologize for wanting to see Old Glory on Mars in our own lifetime and, in the centuries to come, for demanding free people among the stars. We've got practical know how, we just need to be silly enough to think it possible.
Let’s push ourselves over the brink. Let’s tip the scales. Let’s go.
“I told you,” Matson said slowly, “that it would be rough. Well, sweat it out, son, sweat it out.”
“I can’t stand it.”
“Yes, you can.”
* * *
Ad Astra.
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