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The Daily Dose/October 25, 2007
By Gaylon Kent
The Writer's Shack
GREAT LEAP FORWARD: A mere forty-six years after we did, the Chinese began its lunar exploration program Wednesday, launching an unmanned satellite to the moon. It is expected to reach lunar orbit on November 5 and will map the lunar surface, as well as analyze its chemical and mineral composition.
The Big Picture: The Chinese are not doing these things for their heath. In 2012 they plan to launch a second unmanned mission that will land on the moon and in 2017 launch an unmanned mission that will land, explore and return to earth.
USA! USA!: Meanwhile, America, a country that first put men on the moon 38 years ago, a little more than a decade after starting its space program from scratch, now needs 14 years advance notice to return to the moon, with very tentative NASA plans calling for a manned Martian landing in 2037.
What The Hell Happened? That in 2007 the United States would need 14 years to return to the moon when we should really need no more than a few weeks advance notice should cause this nation to go stand in the corner and hang its head in shame. It's like the New England Patriots needing to buy some jock straps and footballs before training camp starts. There is absolutely no good reason why in 2007 we are not looking back fondly at our first two or three Martian landings and looking forward to our first Martian colony.
But we're not. Heck, we're not even looking back at the moon landing anymore because that has faded from national consciousness. Following the triumph of the Apollo program, arguably mankind's finest hour, we lost interest in Skylab and became comfortable with the space shuttle, which, while useful enough, was designed to be a tool in a comprehensive space exploration program, rather than a centerpiece.
The Waiting Game: One of the reasons this country needs so long to do what it has already done is that we simply are not prepared. The shuttle will be retired at the end of the decade and this county does not have a follow up in place. We're not even close, either, and there will be nothing available to spur along our space goals. So, while other countries run active, flourishing - if novitiate - space programs, America continues to fart around, and we won't even be able to do that after 2010 because the shuttle's follow-up, Orion, will not be ready until 2014.
Listen Up: Reasons why we lost interest are many. As a nation, we were weary from not only Watergate, but also from Vietnam and the effort Apollo required. Plus, significantly, we were more than a decade into an era - which continues today - where this nation was managed and not led. Kennedy was the last real leader this country had. Johnson tried to lead, but got mired in problems here and abroad, Nixon was a crook, Ford and Carter meant well but Ford never had a chance and Carter spent too much time fussing over who could play on the White House tennis court. Reagan couldn't lead because he himself was managed like no president before or since, which is saying something consider the current president has trouble speaking in understandable sentences. Two Bush's and a Clinton followed Reagan's example, and, as a result this country's political process is nothing more than a Darwinian nightmare of single-issue zealots and the elected officials who cater to them.
Uh, Can We Get Back On Message Here?: Since this country no longer required a national, unified effort in space, young Americans began doing other things with their professional lives. Kids got MBA's instead of aerospace degrees, and, while engineering schools still turn out graduates, more and more come from foreign countries and take their expertise home with them, and two of our largest population segments, women and Hispanics, earn only about a quarter of engineering degrees.
Hey, Here's An Idea: Official Writer's Shack policy favors space exploration. It's human nature to explore, to go where you haven't been before. It's why people went from seeing what was on the other side of that mountain to what was down the river to what was on the other side of the ocean. It's why men bring women home and try to get them drunk.
And it's why we went to the moon and why we should go to Mars. We have no other options; we're human, as a species we want to go.
But the time when individual nations sponsored these things has passed.
One, America isn't the only player any more. The space scorecard is filling up, as China is showing. And private business is getting into the act. As the worldwide gap between rich and poor continues to grow, more people have insane amounts of money to blow and they didn't get rich being told what they could and could not do, and they are insane enough to think the private sector could pull this off. The time has come to start thinking as a planet. We here at the Writer's Shack are ethnocentric enough to think America should be on the point here, but to think that in the 21st century this should not be an international effort is folly.
ON THIS DATE IN THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS: One day after the blockade began, resulting in 16 Russian ships reversing course, two US ships try to intercept a Soviet tanker, though when it refuses to stop it is allowed to proceed to Cuba since it was deemed unlikely to be carrying contraband. The UN gets involved, typically counseling both countries to avoid confrontation in the blockade zone for a "few days", President Kennedy authorizes the loading of nuclear weapons on US aircraft and the US military goes to DefCon2 for the first, and so far only known, time, though portions of the US military were put on DefCon 1 alert during the Gulf War.
THESE PEOPLE LIVE AMONGST US: A poll released today by the Associated Press shows that a robust 34 percent of us believe in ghosts, which is, not too surprisingly, roughly the same number that believe in UFO's, which leads us to wonder, with so many people interested in stuff like that, why interest in a real space program has lagged.
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