NASA's Future
The following editorial appeared in the St, Louis Post-Dispatch on Monday, March 31:
Fifty years ago last October, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth. As a direct result, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was created a year later.
Today, 50 years after its birth, 39 years after the first moon landing and 17 years after the end of the Cold War, NASA still is looking for a goal and a mission that will excite Americans the way beating the Soviets to the moon did. Like a middle-age athlete who yearns for the glory days of his youth, NASA has decided to return to the moon, perhaps as a prelude to going to Mars.
Shana Dale, NASA's deputy administrator, was in St. Louis last week as part of a seven-city goodwill tour celebrating the space agency's golden anniversary, touting its benefits to local economies and trying to build excitement in its new mission. As it happened, the space shuttle Endeavour was completing a 16-day mission at the same time, a nearly flawless mission that nonetheless underscored NASA's identity crisis.
Endeavour delivered a Japanese-built laboratory module and a Canadian-built robotic maintenance device to the International Space Station. Crew members performed five extended space walks, testing and maintaining equipment. It was a technologically demanding, scientifically complex mission that went off like clockwork and - because it didn't crash or blow up - got very little public attention.
Perhaps that's as it should be. Science is important for the sake of science. The space station is important for international scientific cooperation. In fact, within the scientific community there is a substantial school of thought that says manned spaceflight eats far too much of NASA's $17.6-billion-a-year budget. NASA launches a lot of unmanned missions that perform gloriously. So what if they don't excite the public imagination.
Alas, as a bureaucracy, NASA's first goal is to justify its existence. Manned spaceflight is sexier than science.
Some in the scientific community think the back-to-the-moon program is a waste of time and resources. On Wednesday, in one sign of the deep disagreements over priorities, S. Alan Stern resigned his post as head of the agency's science division. As it turns 50, NASA finds itself exploring its own mid-life crisis.
