Mars, Brought to you by Virgin Galactic

With the launch of the final shuttle mission from NASA Friday, I started feeling an old recurring pain in the ass. What I’m ticked about is all the promise and hope that We the People had back during the Apollo missions, when we all knew we would be in deep space soon, being left deflated like a morning after party balloon.
Granted my childhood hopes were fueled by Star Trek – the original please, (nobody Captains like Kirk) along with Star Wars, the writings of Isaac Asimov and all the other science-fiction, and fact, media that told us how great it was gonna’ be when we conquered the stars and how soon it would come to pass.
Well, what the hell happened to the conquering part?
Is it just me who remembers, or weren’t we supposed to be living on and operating deep space exploration bases from the moon by now? I’m just sure that according to the normal evolution of technology that we should be near faster-than-light engines now since we went to the moon 40+ years ago with computers that would barely power a preschooler’s toy laptop today.
I think that one of the sorriest collective mistakes repeated by the past few administrations is that the White House hasn’t put us to the challenge to shoot for the stars Kennedy-like, with a target date included and adequate funding.
Yes, I know before you say it that G.W. Bush sort of backed a Mars mission, but it was more along the lines of him saying, “Ya’ll go on to Mars, when you get a chance.” There was no “Get it done,” from the leader of the free world. And Obama I’m not sure knows NASA exists as anything more than a talking point.
The space program has, so far, brought significant strides in many science disciplines that have saved lives and improved our general way of life not to mention giving us Velcro and Tang, but it seems like we just decided after going to the moon and abandoning SkyLab (that was our first space station for you kids going to public schools) that we were good. So they developed the worlds most expensive and high-tech delivery service possible and called it a day.
I mean really, since the space station got on line all the heavy duty science has been done there. The astronauts do some experiments on the shuttles but not much anymore and not at all after this week. The shuttle has really just been UPS-Space Division for a while now. Not that many people noticed.
People need something exciting, that they can understand without an advanced degree, to get behind. When we were in the space race with the Soviet Union (our arch enemy for most of the 20th century for you kids going to public schools) everybody was behind it and when Neil Armstrong put the first footprints on the moon, they were American made. But today, most people don’t even know when a shuttle takes off or returns, unless something goes wrong.
I believe that the seeds of apathy over space were planted by NASA. They wanted us to see space travel as routine and nothing that special as we spread out across the stars and they succeeded to the degree in that it’s accepted as so routine, only we old Sci-Fi geeks bother to keep up much. So, nobody really noticed that we seem to again be chained to earth’s orbit, just like a Mercury Astronaut. (Project Mercury was America's first human spaceflight program and the first major undertaking of the newly created NASA. It proved that human spaceflight was possible, for you kids going to public schools).
I want to be clear, it’s not the fault of the astronauts or the support teams or the scientists that we are losing space, it’s the fault of NASA’s leadership for not convincing the feds that we need to be in space exploring, not for aliens, not for God, but simply because it’s there and we are here.
No matter whether you believe in a higher power or just good old fashioned Darwinism, man is an explorer at the core, a migratory animal that has to find new frontiers to conquer. We are not meant to stay put. Otherwise, we’d still be in the garden or swinging in the trees.
Also, I have to admit it chafes me a bit that our folks are going to have to hitch rides up to the station with the Russians for a while.
Still, there may be hope for us, even if it is a more distasteful sort of hope. They say that we might be heading in the direction of private space companies building the ships and taking over the missions in a competitive manner. Maybe that will be for the best, maybe not. The government is well known for going with the lowest bidder and you get what you pay for.
I see little chance that the days of NASA will be unnumbered and then international, corporate moguls will take control of what should be our national program. So in the end I guess I’m disappointed that when the first flag gets planted on Mars, it will be embossed with a corporate logo instead of being Old Glory. Mars, Brought to you by Virgin Galactic.