Space technology is still important

From the Stylus, College at Brockport: Space technology is still important
Apollo astronaut and first man on the Moon, Neil Armstrong, stood up in front of congress to express his disgust over the state of NASA's affairs.

Among his bones of contention with lawmakers is the fact President Obama withdrew support for the Constellation Space Exploration program after promising it was a priority over the past few years. In a letter to the president, Armstrong wrote, "Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity."

These are grim words, but then again, Armstrong is just the right man to say them. He and his crew allegedly traveled over 242,000 miles of dead vacuum to land on the Moon without any guarantee they would be able to get back again. If that worked, they would have to make that same trip back and slam into the atmosphere at 36,000 feet per second, protected by a metal can and some ceramics.

The chances that something could go fatally wrong were astoundingly high. However that didn't stop Neil, Buzz Aldrin, and their pilot, Michael Collins to blast off into history.

Now the space shuttle program is dead and there's nothing left to replace it. These men don't want see the dream of space exploration end in a committee. They risked their lives for these advancements and many of their friends died along the way.

Now, I think it's important for me to clarify this point: I do not blame the president for retiring the shuttle program. The first shuttle was flight-tested in 1977, that's two years older than my 1979 Impala. We got over 30 years of service out of the ships, so I can't blame them for taking those tired old horses out to pasture.

What I do lay at the president's feet is that there was no program to replace the aging fleet. By the time Apollo 17 made its trip to the Moon in December of 1972, the Space Shuttle contract had been awarded to contractors who had been working on it for almost a year.

As Atlantis made its final landing last July, I was bothered by how little it seemed to matter to anyone under 40. I imagine the reason I paid any attention to it was due to the fact that my dad raised me to have an enduring fascination of space. Not everyone my age had that.

I think some of it has to do with that fact that we don't have a sense of urgency about space anymore. In the '60s, everyone wanted to see an American on the Moon before the USSR. As this century breaks, no one sees the point.

We're so jaded by the glut of technology at our fingertips, that we forget just how awesome safely travelling to the Moon and back really is.

We have smart phones and videogame consoles in our homes with more power than the reel-to-reel banks that NASA had in the '60s and they took men into space. Meanwhile, we complain that Google Maps routed us through construction.

The prevailing argument for cutting NASA's budget — and dashing hopes for future space exploration against the rocks — is that we have more pressing earthbound matters to deal with. Fair enough, but let me point out the only way we can do anything meaningful in space is to do it as humans — not Americans, Russians or Chinese.

When I went to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida some years ago, the first thing I noticed was you can easily overhear a dozen languages. It struck me then that exploring space is a human endeavor. If we want to move beyond ourselves, we need to stop wallowing in our petty problems here and look to the stars as one.