As a boy I wrote a detailed seven-page letter to President Clinton outlining why he should send a child into space. Coincidentally I suggested the child should be me.
Today, it is a dream that not even in my most fanciful of moments can I still consider a reality.
Last month, Barack Obama unveiled his new budget which abruptly cut NASA’s ambitious Constellation program.
It was an endeavor that would have seen us return to the moon before the decade was out and then set our sights on Mars.
Now, with that single stroke of the pen, he has destroyed whatever speck of moon dust there was of my grandest dream ever becoming a reality. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby rightly observed it was the “death march for the future of US human spaceflight.”
Announced by the Bush Administration in the wake of the 2003 Columbia disaster, the Constellation program was a healthy injection of Obama’s favorite home remedy at a time it was most needed: hope.
But now the magic and romance of grand idealism in the politics of space travel is well and truly dead.
It is hard to imagine President Obama channeling the Camelot era of Kennedy and committing the nation to an unquantifiable and almost unimaginable goal by the end of the decade on any issue. Or perhaps even more importantly, rallying the nation across the aisle towards it.
In these days of stark and bitter partisanship coupled with a vicious media cycle of shock jocks and pundits it would be one of the most dangerous political moves in history. Health care is the closest he has come to such idealism, but it has been so diluted by the political process you would hardly call it visionary stuff. Or to use an appropriate pun: the right stuff.
By most estimates, the cost of launching a manned mission to Mars would total around US $40 billion. Not much really when you think of the size of the bank bailouts and stimulus packages steamrolled across the developed world in the last eighteen months.
Imagine if simply a small part of the Obama stimulus package was used to invest in the vision of a manned mission to Mars, or building a base on the moon. An investment of that size in a sector so diverse that every Congressional district is linked to launching the shuttle in some way would have been phenomenal.
The perplexing reality is that on two of the most traditionally liberal stalwarts of policy: spaceflight and foreign aid, President Bush has actually beaten President Obama thus far.
There is little doubt the Apollo space program cost more than could be afforded at the time. At its peak, NASA’s direct funding alone totaled 5% of the federal budget. This was against the backdrop of a country gripped in the bipolar struggle of a Cold War with the USSR and struggling economically to sustain a rising insurgency war in Vietnam.
But Apollo was more than just a goal.
The prospect of landing on the moon raised people’s spirits. Bank bailouts or some dodgy home insulation in the Australian example have hardly done that.
The benefits were much wider too.
Advances in medicine, technology and energy efficiency have saved lives and increased our overall quality of life. If it wasn’t for Apollo, we may well not have yet developed lasers sufficiently to conduct heart and eye surgery, and solar systems might too be a thing of the future.
With India, Japan and China each successfully conducting manned space missions in the last decade, now is the time for the US to be bolstering rather than booting the sector to the ground. At times it seems like the best thing for the US space industry might just be China’s power becoming a rival to the US. Either that or the effects of climate change accelerating rapidly or the discovery of intelligent life somewhere in the universe.
Sometimes I still catch myself looking up there at the moon and wondering when we will be going back, and who that will be. My astronaut-idol Jim Lovell once proclaimed: “Imagine if Christopher Columbus had returned from the New World and nobody returned in his footsteps?”
Under President Obama it seems like one giant leap away.
Thom Woodroofe, 20, is the 2009 Young Victorian of the Year and founder of Left Right Think-Tank. He is currently living and studying in the USA overcoming his lifelong desire to become an astronaut.
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