Endeavoring to Discover Today's Challenge

Parents fill Facebook with cute kid’s sayings as frequently as bored office workers post their morning breakfast,  but this status last week made me pause:

Listening to the final shuttle mission in the car with the kids. After lift off Ava started to cry. When I asked her why she was sad she said, "It was the last shuttle mission...NOW I have to be a LAWYER!”

While I couldn’t help but chuckle (especially since Ava is a spitfire and I can just see her in her astronaut suit), it’s a tragic line. Even a seven-year-old understands the scrapping of the space shuttle program reflects a broader narrowing of the future. While the manned space flight program needed a makeover, today the program is adrift. Yes, NASA supposedly plans to send astronauts to Mars by the 2030s, but there seems to be no specific, immediate plan to achieve this goal. In the meantime, when our astronauts need to go to the International Space Station, they will hitch a ride on a Russian rocket.

I remember talking to my grandmother at the outbreak of Desert Storm. “I’m tired of wars,” she said, “We need to go back to the moon. When we went to the moon, people were excited and inspired. People had hope.” A college student, I doubted her words. But I realize how integral the space program is to our collective inspiration as I see our nation relinquish the final frontier to cost effectiveness.

While many adults are too young have seen the first lunar landing, its films imprint our minds. Movies -–from October Sky to Apollo 13—make us believe anything is possible. In the early eighties, space shuttle launches were must-see TV, whether the live viewing was broadcast during or after school hours. And for many of us, “Where were you when the space shuttle exploded?” is one of the seminal questions of our youth.

Space exploration inspires; it moves us forward in our search for knowledge and growth. It provides a place both for explosive scientific understanding and limitless artistic imagination. Even in ancient times, the best stories were about the stars.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy spoke to students and faculty at Rice University in Houston, Texas, with Shakespearean intensity.

The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space.

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. …We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade 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, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

That generation achieved its space goal, but today we’re faltering. Instead of leading, we are taking a back seat... literally hitching a ride. And my little friend Ava knows it.

The end of the space shuttle era encapsulates the decline that’s happening in America as even our strip malls lie dormant. Turn on any television, and you hear pundits saying we  “can’t,” and “shouldn’t” and “mustn’t.” There is collective lack of daring and inspiration, a reluctance to do hard things—from finding a real solution to our energy dependence to doggedly living within our means.

Times are tough. Perhaps postponing American manned space flights is one of many necessary budget cuts, but with the financial savings come expensive symbolic and emotional cost.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden commented on the final Atlantis flight, saying, “Children who dream of being astronauts today may not fly on the space shuttle . . . but, one day, they may walk on Mars. The future belongs to us. And just like those who came before us, we have an obligation to set an ambitious course and take an inspired nation along for the journey.”

We do have an obligation: to set our children on a path of excellence—to inspire them to dream beyond the stars. At the moment, NASA’s goals seem vague and nebulous. It’s hard to imagine a second grader dressing up as an astronaut for career day if the next American manned space flight occurs when she is in her late twenties.

I hope Administrator Bolden is serious, because I want to see this nation’s next generation ride “the first waves” of their “greatest adventure.”