Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon years before I was born. It was, at the time, the most extraordinary thing that many Americans had ever witnessed, broadcast on live TV in July 1969. The moment was infamously described by Armstrong as “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” (you can listen to the original transmission here).
More than 43 years later, the arrival of the Curiosity Rover on Mars was greeted with much the same kind of enthusiasm. The landing was tweeted, perhaps more than talked about, very nearly live with a new generation; of course, there was something of a delay since signals and satellite images had to make the 154 million trip miles from Mars and that takes a little bit of time. Hundreds of thousands of folks followed Curiosity on twitter @marscuriosity and on Facebook (yes, the Curiosity has its own fan page) for the latest news, pictures, and commentary of the most exciting space mission in years.
In case you haven’t been following Curiosity, the Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Mars Science Laboratory mission landed a large, mobile laboratory called, appropriately, Curiosity, on Mars this week. It’s been a long time in the making: the spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on November 26, 2011. It was designed to steer itself to the Red Planet before touching down – which it did successfully without crashing (whew). The cost of the project? $2.5 billion. You can read the specs in detail straight from NASA (downloads as a pdf).
Curiosity will explore the Red Planet for about the next two years. The hope is that the rover can figure out something that scientists have been talking about forever: whether there is life on Mars.
I know what you’re thinking: you didn’t even think we had a space program anymore. A lot of people didn’t. You see, NASA used to be all the rage. It was established under President Eisenhower in 1958 (gobbling up a similar agency), just about ten years before we first landed on the moon. When it started, the agency consisted of approximately 8,000 employees and had an annual budget of $100 million.
By the 1960s, space was officially cool. We were sending up missions to space – and to the moon – faster and better than the Soviets, which, let’s face it, was our primary competition. By the 1970s, moonwalks were routine and our astronauts were bringing back moon rocks like they were souvenirs from Crystal Cave. We even built a space station (remember Skylab?). Funding wasn’t really an issue: we were prepared as a country to do whatever it took to go faster and farther than ever before.
In the 1980s, Reagan had his own Apollo moment when during the 1984 State of the Union address, he announced plans to collaborate with the Soviets on an international space station, saying:
Our second great goal is to build on America’s pioneer spirit…and that’s to develop that frontier. A sparkling economy spurs initiatives, sunrise industries and makes older ones more competitive.
He went on to direct NASA to build a space station “within a decade” echoing President Kennedy’s direction to land Americans on the moon during the 1960s, saying:
America has always been greatest when we dared to be great. We can reach for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic, and scientific gain. Tonight, I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade.
Missions accomplished and accomplished.
But after more than 100 manned missions to space, our enthusiasm – and our money – ran out.
In 2006, NASA announced plans to build a permanent moon base. In 2010, President Obama put a stop to those plans after concern circulated that the project wasn’t feasible. By 2011, the Space Shuttle program formally ended, crushing the dreams of little Buzz Aldrins and Sally Rides to be forever (or not – NASA might not have any shuttles but they’re still totally still hiring astronauts).
Little by little, we chipped away at NASA’s budget: the golden days of space exploration were, it seemed, no more. For 2011, NASA’s $18.4 billion budget represents about 0.5% of the federal budget. For 2012, spending on NASA will be even less: as a percentage of the total budget, it will be at its lowest point since 1959. The 2012 NASA budget (again, as a percentage of the federal budget) will represent just 10% of what it was during the heady years of 1965 and 1966 and about half of what was allotted in 1994.
Surprised at those numbers? Interestingly, taxpayers think that NASA’s budget represents about 20% of the total federal government budget. And don’t be fooled into thinking that’s a recent development. Taxpayers have long overestimated the cost of the space program and generally believed that it wasn’t worth our tax dollars – even when we were leaving other countries in the, er, moon dust. In fact, throughout the 1960s, most Americans didn’t believe there was value in the space program – that is, until July 1969. That little hop on the moon changed the perception of the whole country. It made us believe in something again.
This, of course, makes me wonder. Is the aptly named Curiosity a game-changer for NASA? As we peer at the images of a robot – built by human hands – gathering data millions of miles away, is there maybe something that makes us think that we need something to believe in again?
Space has fascinated mankind for years. I have to wonder, when you look at history, if it’s not the challenge more than the actual answer that drives us to know what’s out there and what’s next? Can we put a price on that? And more importantly, do we want to?
Perhaps the answer is best found from those who have been to space. The Commander of Apollo 15, Dave Scott, was the seventh man to walk on the Moon. He said, at the time:
As I stand out here in the wonders of the unknown at Hadley, I sort of realize there’s a fundamental truth to our nature, Man must explore . . . and this is exploration at its greatest. (You can listen to the original transmission here.)
