Imagination, stuck on the launchpad

Ijoined the world in watching America’s greatest space feats, including Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969. But I sat by myself last week at a congressional hearing on the future of manned space flight. No other newspaper, TV or online reporters felt compelled to show.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish” is the quote from Proverbs 29:18 on a wall of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology hearing room.

The inattention is as unfortunate as the state of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is apparently screwed up.

You remember the space program, don’t you?

NASA retired the space shuttles, and then a George W. Bushera program meant to replace them was ditched by President Obama to focus on research and the commercial sector.

Then those plans in turn were undermined by the old-guard aerospace sector lobbying for work and senators sucking up to them.

We’re left with a meager Apolloshuttle hybrid. At the current rate, we probably won’t send a two-legged passenger beyond the skies again until after the Chicago Cubs win a World Series. Meanwhile, when it comes to rocket launches, we look sad compared to China, Russia and even France.

“It’s like watching a slow-moving train wreck,” a reporter who covers NASA tells me.

That helps explain why a hearing on manned space exploration was fascinating.

“It’s fair to say,” Mitch Daniels told me later, “that NASA is too often hamstrung, Congress micromanages and one can’t move resources from the old to the new.”

Daniels is one of the smartest, more fearless and fiscally minded fellows in our public life, which made his testimony all the more revealing.

He’s a Republican former budget director for Bush (known back then as “Mitch the Knife”) and efficiency- and reform-minded governor of Indiana. He’s now president of Purdue University, an engineering mecca whose alums include 23 U.S. astronauts.

Daniels was there because he co-chaired a committee picked to assess the future of human space flight by the high-level National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Sciences.

Their report makes a strong case for raising our goals and expenditures, notably in trying to get to Mars. It concedes you can’t reliably quantify economic returns from such a project, or claim that it contributes to national security, or that we’ll create off-earth settlements that would lengthen the survival of our species.

But while granting that “no single rationale alone seems to justify the value of pursuing human spaceflight,” it found many aspirational reasons, like inspiring students, and practical benefits like raising our international stature.

“In the end we came to the strong consensus that there is a convincing case to be made for a continuation of our nation’s human spaceflight program,” Daniels testified.

There was general sympathy among a committee that included Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.), 71 and the queen of House headgear, who was bedecked in a Day-Glo red Stetson that looked like a disco ball.

But wait: Was that Mitch the Knife talking about more government funding? For sure, he told me later, one must jack up NASA’s $18 billion budget. The federal budget is $4 trillion, so NASA takes up one-half of 1%, with space-related programs comprising just half of that.

But what about the lack of popular interest?

Even at the height of NASA’s lunar glories in the late 1960s to early 1970s, popular support was “surprisingly tepid.”

Daniels sees that as a positive. The public is inattentive, yet permissive. That means, he says, there’s an opportunity to impress them with something not in great abundance these days.

“It’s leadership,” he said.

Can we send humans back to space?