Advent Calendar 3/25

I was out at a show tonight and it's late so here is an essay I wrote on the history of NASA, enjoy.

-Bailey S. Fox

<3

The Man on the Moon

“Landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth within a decade,” was declared by John F. Kennedy in 1961, and Ruskies be damned we got to the Moon in eight years. Now two things helped this. Our Cold War and the fact that Kennedy was shot before he ever got to see us get to the moon. Two things fueled us, competition and honoring our late president. Nowadays we have technology that Gene Roddenberry couldn’t dream of yet, despite Curiosity on Mars and New Horizons sending us HD photos of Pluto the public now has a waning interest in space. We are in possession of a moon rover that will never see the moon and astronauts who are launching from other competing countries. We still have a fierce competition with Russia, so who needs to be shot to get the public interested in space?

NASA was officially conceived on October 1st, 1958 in response to Russia launching Sputnik 1 in 1957. Despite the horrible things it did to the entertainment industry, the red scare in America brought about the birth of the next great age of exploration. Just 10 days after it was officially ordained as a government entity it had the first launch of its aptly named "Pioneer I." From 1958-1986, The space program flourished. The article "Chronology of Defining Events in NASA History" has over 114 entries of "defining moments" between the years of 1958-1986. The golden age of space exploration started with the conception and ended the year of the Challenger explosion. It’s clear that the public’s support of  NASA wavered after 1986 and in 1990 this happened:

Because of the difficulties NASA encountered in its major programs at the end of the 1980s, as well as the need periodically to review status and chart the course for the future, in 1990 President George Bush chartered an Advisory Committee on the Future of the U.S. Space Program ... recommending several key actions. All of these related to the need to create a balanced space program-one that included human space flight, robotic probes, space science, applications, and exploration within a tightly constrained budget.

(Chronology of Defining Events in NASA History)

If 1986 is too speculative a year to truly mark the shift in the tone of NASA’s work, then 1990 is when the axe dropped: The king was dead, long live the king. NASA’s golden age was over.

However, the decline in the reign of NASA doesn’t mean it is not doing incredible things, earlier this year the New Horizons probe sent back our first clear images of everyone’s favorite Roman death deity: Pluto.

With Curiosity roving around Mars, NASA continues to do amazing and wonderful things today in 2015. There are still brilliant men and women with the quintessential spark of adventure and curiosity that defines the American dream. And we still have brave men and women blasting off to the International Space Station conducting groundbreaking experiments and doing covers of David Bowie’s Space Oddity. There is no shortage of amazing things that we still do, but we lack the frenzy, NASA no longer has the carte blanche it once had, and that might be the reason Matt Damon’s remake of Castaway is only a work of fiction, and there are no humans bouncing around on the Roman god of War. The space race isn’t the patriotic wonderland it was, now it’s more scientific than braggadocious. It’s more about the final frontier, finding new horizons rather than warming a Cold War. The selling point has switched, it’s no longer about god and country, it’s about scientific advancement and the betterment of mankind, and that’s a much more complex and abstract concept. And even though NASA has provided things like memory foam, braces wire, cordless dust busters, better baby food, LED lights, and any other number of things since sliced bread, not every taxpayer knows how instrumental NASA has become to the modern era. (NASA Technologies Benefit our Lives) 

A good argument can be made for unmanned missions at our current times. We're in a period of growth, we are beyond the moon but not yet to mars, our next intergalactic target in our solar system wide shooting gallery. And with this stage of growth came to the rise of unmanned missions. In the early days of NASA, we saw unmanned missions, missions helmed by dogs, monkeys, and all sorts of other non-sapien mammals. Now our missions are unmanned but helmed by robots. Like the multi-million dollar, RC cars they roam the galaxy exploring the final frontier, in search of the next big thing.

Throughout the years, NASA has maintained its sense of explorations, though it has been made to transform its means, through preserving the motive. Just because men and women aren't traipsing around the stars at this time, it does not make NASA any less of a beautifully exploitative, scientific, and human institution. The video released by NASA in anticipation of New Horizons passing Pluto, wasn't a cold and scientific video, it was full of beautiful music, it evoked emotion. That sense of pride in what we as Americans are discovering. NASA has held on to that sense of exploration that it was first founded with. It might have lost the Cold War era paranoia that fueled it, but it held onto the passion and love that flew Neil Armstrong to the moon in 1969. The words "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." These are not words of cold, heartless science, but of a warm, human passion.  

A friend of mine, Ian once said to me as we discussed the topic “People really like the idea of other people going to space.” And I have to agree with him. I will not be satisfied until we have men and women on Mars, and maybe even beyond. I don’t think we will have reached the next great space milestone until we get people, real human beings in the flesh exploring other planets. Is it less efficient and cost effective than robots? Yes. But, I believe we will do it anyway, because we have generations of people raised on the lore of space travel, final frontiers and galaxies far-far away. I believe we will not be satisfied until we have humans exploring space once more. We will once more have brave men and women sitting in tin cans, far above the world. I believe that mankind, not just America, but the planet as a whole will go out in space, in a larger exodus than ever before. I believe the next great migration will be to the stars.

Works Cited

"CHRONOLOGY OF DEFINING EVENTS IN NASA HISTORY."CHRONOLOGY OF DEFINING

 EVENTS IN NASA HISTORY. NASA, 1998. Web. 12 Nov. 2015.

"NASA Technologies Benefit Our Lives." NASA Technologies Benefit Our Lives. NASA, n.d. Web.

12 Nov. 2015.

Grochinski, Ian. Personal Interview, Nov. 15 2015