Let's Once Again Dare to Dream
By Alcestis C. Oberg
Forty years ago, I watched the first moon landing and thought it would change my life. My husband was in graduate school becoming an expert in celestial mechanics, required for charting courses to Mars and beyond. My friend Pat Santy went to medical school to prepare for a career in space medicine, while other friends turned toward futuristic careers in planetary geology and spacecraft engineering.
We believed ourselves to be a golden generation of skilled space pioneers. We saw the future as the great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke did ― with space stations, moon bases and deep space vehicles by 2001. We would be the Magellans and the Captain Cooks of our time, except the solar system would be our ocean and the universe would be our world.
It was not until 20 years later, when I interviewed the great managers of the Apollo program, that I realized how unique the program was. NASA administrator James Fletcher told me of the unprecedented political support ― impossible to achieve afterward. Gen. Sam Phillips told of how unblinking truthfulness reigned supreme throughout the budgetary, manufacturing and engineering flow. But both men noted that those teams of builders drifted back into their lives after the second or third moon landing. The quest was over for them, and for America.
But I'm of that golden generation, dreaming still of bringing Mars under the plow, of drinking the waters from Saturn's moon Enceladus, and of transforming the Unknown into the next New World. We should continue what the Apollo program began: the conquest of space and the voyages of discovery, starting with manned missions to Mars and beyond.
President Obama has convened a commission to figure out what to do next in space, and he'll be confronted with three choices. The moon enthusiasts will argue, quite reasonably, that further exploration and development of the moon are the next logical goals. We got there, so why not do something with it? The more timid near-Earthers will argue that we really haven't learned how to live in near-Earth orbit yet, and that we should continue to spend time close to Mommy Earth before we go adventuring again. So far, the near-Earthers have won because programs such as the shuttle and space station are more low-key, and their budgets can be stretched out in practical ways.
Choose the beyond
If I were on that commission, I'd be the feisty advocate for future generations and the third option: Build the true infrastructure of the 21st century, the space highway to Mars and beyond. This option does not have to be, and probably can't be, the intense full-court press that the Apollo program was. But building an interplanetary infrastructure should be the nation's long-term goal and the space program's coherent organizing principle.
I would repeat President Kennedy's transcendent summary of the American spirit: ``We choose to go to the moon … and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills." Our species, I would argue, are tough and luminous beings whose best instincts are exercised when we are challenged to explore new worlds and open highways to magical places for future generations to develop.
The technologies required to open a highway to Mars have vast practical applications on Earth, of course. Not only are great energy-generating and propulsion systems necessary for journeys to Mars, but we'd have to learn more about intense resource recycling, and measuring and preserving physical and mental health in adverse environments. We'd have to fortify the nation's educational and labor pools, as we did with the Apollo program - a boost to our economy, directly or indirectly, that would last at least two generations. The golden generation educated to go to Mars instead turned its efforts toward other great explorations: mapping the human genome, building the Internet.
But ultimately, the spinoffs are not why we undertake these great ventures. The greatest payoffs will be those we cannot predict. Look at America. The allure of the New World was not in finding cities of gold or fountains of youth as predicted, but in finding freedom, a chance for ordinary people to build a new life away from the suffocating restraints of the Old World, a chance for their children to do so much better and be so much greater than they were.
We tasted other worlds
Likewise, the Apollo program's riches were not just the science locked in the rocks the astronauts brought back or in the commercial spinoffs from NASA's mighty technologies. The Apollo program ``technologized" our world ― changed how we think, how we do things. We could see ourselves striding on alien planets because the astronauts really did. We could see ourselves building an extra-terrestrial civilization someday because our souls had already begun to build it in our imaginations and in our culture with the immense popularity of ``Star Wars and Star Trek."
If John Kennedy were alive, he might repeat to young President Obama what he said to the nation nearly 50 years ago: ``The American, by nature, is optimistic. He is experimental, an inventor and a builder who builds best when called upon to build greatly."
I would merely tell President Obama to utter the only two words important to the spirit of the waiting nation that achieved the moon landings 40 years ago, and could do so much more: ``Let's go."
Alcestis "Cooky" Oberg was a semifinalist in NASA's Journalist in Space Program and is a member of USA Today's board of contributors.
