Making Room For Space

We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged….What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.
            Carl Sagan, 1990

In January 1986, I was embarking on the last months of my junior year in high school.  That January, as we watched in the library (the only place to find a television), the Challenger exploded into pieces over the skies of Florida.  I was a boy then.  As a man, as a teacher, I fielded questions about the space shuttle Columbia, which broke apart over the skies of north Texas in 2003.  My students did not know the story of Challenger first hand but they had heard of it, in particular, with relation to the more recent tragedy.  Their questions were obvious.  Why are we doing this?  Are there not a million other things for which we can use the money? 

As we experience occasional failure in our attempts to explore space, people ask if the cost is worth it.  It has been said before but it bears repeating.  I believe we, as a race, need something bigger than ourselves for which to strive.  People need something that takes us from our ordinary and mundane problems to focus on something larger and potentially more impactful.  As a race, we’ve never accomplished so much as when we were in pursuit of a magnificent and a previously unreachable goal. 

Where is the John F. Kennedy who said the reason we should shoot for the moon is for the same reason Rice plays Texas in football?  Science has always galvanized the country but science today focuses on those things too small to see and therefore, provides no intellectual and national focus.  What about something more tangible like a moon colony?  People laughed when former Speaker Newt Gingrich mentioned this in a debate during the Republican primaries but he has stumbled upon something.  What about a colony on Mars?  Carl Sagan felt it was indeed possible, and to an industrious, imaginative and bold people, what is not possible?      

Absent of something big to achieve, mankind tends to devolve into petty arguments and capricious debates that have few long-term consequences.  It is as if we are feeding off ourselves to occupy our time.  One societal commentator suggested that people have arrived to a point where they see alone time as something to be solved, not a time to simply think and contemplate.  If we had a larger goal to consider, would we have tons of television shows where self-indulgent, repugnant personalities wallow in their own dramas while acting like immature high schoolers?  Do our lack of goals and aspirations reduce us to the lowest common denominator?  Are we not the personification of the axiom that idle hands are the devil’s playground? 

Since I was a young boy, I enjoyed watching Star Trek with my father and grew increasingly interested in the notion of space.  As much as space captivated me, however, I really did not have the tools nor the guidance from teachers on how to pursue that interest.  My interest in the space shuttle had been stoked early on when the first flight of a reusable shuttle returned to earth, but I had little connection to it because of my perceived limitations.  However, I always dreamed of space and what secrets and wonders it held.  I would ask my father if God would allow us to travel the stars and the universes when we arrived in Heaven.  In the 1800s, the West represented the last frontier and it fired the imaginations and efforts of Americans toward making its settlement easier and more palatable.  Today, as the show says, space is the true final frontier.  Within this far away boundary exists the salvation of the human race. 

We, as a country, have been known throughout the world for contemplating and attempting magnificent things.  Stephen Fry, British actor, once said that the U.S. is the only place where people say, “Only in America,” and mean it as a compliment.  We need to return to a spirit of innovation, invention and exploration.  The U.S. needs to remove itself from some of its inconsequential issues and set its sights towards something loftier, something more worthy than what currently occupies our collective time and thought.