"Space Age" lingers without the excitement

President Obama is younger than I am, so he missed out on the excitement of what was expansively called the "Space Age," when entire schoolhouses full of children would sit for hours to watch a rocket launched with just one man atop the cylindrical bomb. Young people of my generation watched patiently and excitedly as sub-orbital flights gave way to orbiting space capsules with one man crammed tightly inside. President Kennedy issued a challenge: to put a man on the moon and return him safely "before this decade is out." But when that fantastical challenge was met in July 1969, America lost interest in NASA. Space missions had become routine. Only the near-tragic Apollo 13 mission renewed interest in moon missions, and just briefly.

So Obama, having missed out on much of that excitement, has turned a critical eye toward the whole space flight concept. In an announcement last week, Obama killed a fanciful proposal by President George W. Bush to return astronauts to the moon. The back-to-the-moon program offered little in the way of scientific advancement, and return on investment was hard to identify. Obama says we'll go elsewhere, perhaps to an asteroid, perhaps to Mars, and he expects to see it happen in his lifetime. That's expecting a lot, even from a relatively young president.

In fact, it's hard to see how America can continue to invest billions in space exploration as a government project. Kennedy's challenge was prompted by a Cold War competition: We had to beat the Russians, who had beaten us in putting up a satellite and in putting a man in orbit. But there is no longer any competition. What the United States does in way of space exploration is not done out of fear of competitors. Our current space program is designed in part to prevent the loss of jobs in the aerospace industry.

Given the country's $1 trillion-plus budget deficits, it's time to ask whether we can afford an elective program whose benefits rarely trickle down to ordinary taxpayers. Yes, NASA has pioneered many advances, ranging from Tang instant juice mix to heat-resistant ceramics to computer advances. But nearly all of these advances would have come about without the government's investment in manned space flight. The revolution in computers, for example, occurred in the past 30 years, when space advances were largely stagnant.

The International Space Station has been a scientific disappointment and a fiscal boondoggle that has kept NASA preoccupied with orbital construction. The space shuttle, a vehicle designed to haul equipment to a space station, has been hazardous to its crews and limited in its capabilities. NASA needs to refocus, and relying on private sector vehicles to service the space station, as Obama proposes, makes fiscal sense.

Journeys to asteroids and to Mars still seem far distant and outlandishly expensive. Obama will need to shrink a number of outlandishly expensive budget items if he hopes to balance the federal budget again, sometime in his lifetime.