Space Age’s Glory Fades From View

At 35, merica’s Space Age won’t have to suffer through the angst of a midlife crisis.

The reason is that the Space Age is already dead. The technologies no longer define our times, and the public has grown weary of multibillion-dollar celestial investments that yield minimal psychic or economic rewards.

Space exploration has mutated from a central focus of America’s science and technology dialogue into a peripheral issue. Space is not a meaningful part of the ongoing industrial competitiveness debate, our technology infrastructure discussions or even our defense conversion policy.

To be sure, America should continue to invest in satellite technologies for telecommunications and remote sensing--cheap, deep-space probes would be nice too--but the ideal of space as a meaningful driver of scientific and industrial innovation is now dead.

“Sadly, what is really dead is space as something special--as something that embodies American values and self-image,” says George Washington University’s John M. Logsdon, a longtime observer of U.S. space policy. “I think we’re back to an Eisenhower space policy: We’ll do space when it has tangible benefits for the country. . . . But we are no longer going to invest for preeminence. We clearly are not going to seek space leadership for its own sake.”

“The belief that space is the next frontier and that America will follow its manifest destiny and lead mankind into space is over,” says Laurel L. Wilkening, the University of Washington provost who oversaw the Bush Administration’s final Space Policy Advisory Board report. “We are still the leader because it just so happens our competitors are in worse shape than we are. . . . No space-faring country seems able to do what it takes to keep people in space in a value-enhancing way.”

Most important, perhaps, Wilkening notes that space investments now seem decoupled from the initiatives and aspirations of tax-paying earthlings: “People do not see space as a solution to the problems that they worry about.”

Before the change in administrations, it would have been foolish to write an obituary for the Space Age. The Bush White House aggressively supported the space program and proposed spending well over $30 billion to build space station Freedom alone.

Even as he proposed budget cuts in other science and technology domains, Office of Management and Budget Director Richard Darman was an outspoken public champion of big-ticket space expenditures. The reality that much of the civilian space program--from the shuttle to the Hubble telescope to the space station--was poorly conceived and unimpressively implemented did not seem to matter much.

Political inertia and a nostalgic sense of futurism--not a coherent vision or cost-effective sensibilities--determined multibillion-dollar space budgets.

Indeed, with few notable exceptions, such as Voyager, the post-Apollo era is the story of the gold-plated porkification of space exploration with programs and promises that delivered less and less for more and more.

Go back and read the original cost and performance claims for the space shuttle or the (literally) pie-in-the-sky proposals for commercial manufacturing; you won’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Even if we ignore the Challenger tragedy--which we should not--the space program had devolved into initiatives, budgets and numbers that lacked credibility. That Challenger was seen internally as a horrible accident, rather than the direct result of chronic mismanagement, confirmed that self-deception had come to overshadow introspection at the civil space program.

While the Clinton Administration has kept on the highly regarded Daniel Goldin as administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, it seems clear that space exploration is not being positioned as either a symbolic or substantive centerpiece of America’s technological prowess. The space station design budget has--rightly--been slashed. Space is virtually ignored when the Administration champions its competitiveness agenda.

So Goldin has been furiously trying to restructure NASA as an agency that justifies a $15-billion annual investment. He bluntly dismisses the notion that either the romance or the importance of space has diminished.

“Ending our commitment to space would be a catastrophe. I believe that space is going to play a significant role in the future of this country, and that this Administration recognizes that,” he insists. “A nation that is not a space-faring nation is a nation that will be in trouble in the next couple of decades. . . . This nation critically needs space for its ecological infrastructure, its technological infrastructure and is communications infrastructure. You just can’t turn a switch off for five or 10 years and say that we’ll come back to it when we’re ready.”

However, Goldin’s visionary fervor is tempered by programs that are being sold on the basis of being fast, cheap and cost-effective. He stresses NASA initiatives that promote technology transfer to industry and boost aerospace over big-budget programs that pour dollars into key Congressional districts.

“I wish this had happened 10 years ago instead of starting to happen now,” says Bruce Murray, a Caltech professor who ran NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. “We’ve put off a lot of things we shouldn’t have. . . . I would rather see a $10-billion NASA doing well than a $40-billion one filled with white elephants.”

NASA’s future lies somewhere in between. Space will always exert a powerful influence on the American imagination. But the constraints of our institutions, our ambition and our purse together proclaim that space has ceased to be America’s future frontier.