John Glenn!

It is difficult to believe that it was fifty years ago today that the first American--John Glenn--lifted off into earth orbit aboard the mercury capsule, Friendship Seven. It is difficult to realize that manned orbital space flight is now well over fifty years old because America was not the first nation to send a human being into orbit. Yuri Gagarin, a Russian cosmonaut, had done it the year before. While we watch John Glenn this morning on the various television morning news shows, Gagarin has been dead for decades, the victim of a plane crash inside of Russian not all that many years after he made his historic first flight into space. NASA was very careful about its space adventures, the Glenn flight had been delayed ten previous times for one reason or another before the successful launch on that February morning fifty years ago. There were no guarantees of success twenty four years before the Challenger shuttle flight ended up exploding in disaster before the eyes of a waiting world and so many school children who watched in classrooms across the nation and the world eager to see the first school teacher launched into space--Sally Ride--who would die before their very eyes.

I was a grade school student on the February day in 1962 in the seventh grade in a fast track class composed of some overachievers who thought that they, one day, might themselves change the world as they watched the change going on right before their very eyes. We had devoted the morning to the flight of John Glenn as we watched and listened to Walter Cronkite tell us about the history that was to be made that day. President John F. Kennedy was also watching from the White House and it was said that he simply said “God speed, John Glenn� when the ignition finally occurred and America was propelled on the back of what we would now consider to be a very primitive rocket and the simple spacecraft that was attached to its top. Kennedy, like so many others of his generation, knew of the risks involved and the great gamble that he and his nation were undertaking out in this vast and virtually unknown new frontier. It had been less than a year before when the president had challenged his country to place a man on the moon and bring him back safely before the end of the 1960’s. The Glenn flight was a giant leap forward along that path.

The flight did not go all that easily nor did it last as long as it was supposed to last because of glitches and the fear that the heat shield might come off before the reentry was finished. So, instead of nine orbits of the earth there were really only about five, but, still yet, it was a success and it propelled the nation forward to do many more Mercury flights before the Gemini two man capsule took over in the coming years along that path to the moon and what has never come beyond it.

The United States, in February of 1962, saw a boundless future in space unfolding before it that has, quite frankly, never been realized in anything close to the form that was being contemplated in serious discussions, films and magazine and newspaper articles of that time and just beyond. We would go to the moon and we would develop a space shuttle and a space station but they were nothing like what movies such as 2001, A space Odyssey held out for us in its release around 1968. Like so much of American industry and manufacturing, we have begun to rely more and more on robotic means to achieve our ends in space as on earth. Over thirty years ago, the United States contemplated being on Mars in the next twenty years, and, quite frankly, following those contemplations, we should have been there over ten years ago. Now we talk still of being on Mars in about another twenty to twenty five years. When we look at the situation as it might actually exist, we will sometime after 2020 lose that space station that we have so carefully constructed and without a lift vehicle like the space shuttle that has been recently retired to help us build another one, we will most likely be out of space entirely except for unmanned robotic vehicles. It takes a great deal of time and money to develop a future in space and what we seem to be contemplating now are cutbacks and retrenchments as nations such as Russia and China take the lead as they strive for their own space stations and trips to a moon that we achieved in a decade that it now almost fifty years ago.
The so called greatest generation that fought world war two gave us that space program and all of the opportunities that came with it but they are almost gone now and the dreams and accomplishments that they did have apparently gone with them. We have accomplished much in the way of medical and computer and communication advances but the engine that propelled all of it--the space program--has been allowed to languish and, even, to fall into a state of ridicule in many circles in this nation. The Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich proposed a colony on the moon by the end of his second term and has been roundly and repeatedly ridiculed for even thinking about something like that sort of thing by all of his other republican opponents. Gingrich has replied that he envisions the whole thing being financed by private industry and public corporations but, still yet, the ridicule has not stopped. In an indirect reference to his space proposal, Newt Gingrich stated about one of his rivals, Mitt Romney, that he was devoid of any sort of big idea that might carry the nation forward. The same might be said of all of his rivals, such as they are. We seem to be missing the “big idea� and have been missing it for a very long time now as we are consumed by the idea that we must pay down a debt and erase a deficit that has become the all consuming paragon of our national and political life.

It is interesting to note that the republican conservative mantra has been to privatize as much of the government as possible, and, space has been no exception to that approach. President Obama has made a decision, when he chose to retire the shuttle fleet, to rely on private sources to get us back into space with the government paying them to ferry astronauts up into space while NASA concentrates on things like going to Mars and a dubious excursion to the asteroid belt. Any return trip to the moon seems to be out of the question and we wonder why that might be. It appears to us that the whole idea is to move the United States out of any active manned involvement in space as quickly as is humanly possible. Visions of a future in space seem to be clouded up in the fog of the reality that those in power and those who would like to be there are really planning for this nation. Space in any real and constructive way is not to be a part of that reality.

So, here we stand fifty years to the day after the first American went into space probably much closer to the reality that some of us will see the day that the last American comes home from space to a world that many of us are not eager to contemplate.

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe