Space, the Final Frontier

If by "final" you mean "the last time we ever tried anything great as a country."   Now, our future is Orwellian -- the daily grind of making, taxing, spending, consuming; the slow march to senescence for an aging population; a youth sated and stupefied by toys and virtual reality games.   Here's Charles Krauthammer on the demise of the space shuttle, the rise of Russian and Chinese space programs, and what it all means as symbol:

As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times around Washington, a final salute before landing at Dulles airport for retirement in a museum, thousands on the ground gazed upward with marvel and pride. Yet what they were witnessing, for all its elegance, was a funeral march.

The shuttle was being carried — its pallbearer, a 747 — because it cannot fly, nor will it ever again. It was being sent for interment. Above ground, to be sure. But just as surely embalmed as Lenin in Red Square.

Is there a better symbol of willed American decline? The pity is not Discovery’s retirement — beautiful as it was, the shuttle proved too expensive and risky to operate — but that it died without a successor. The planned follow-on — the Constellation rocket-capsule program to take humans back into orbit and from there to the moon — was suddenly canceled in 2010. And with that, control of manned spaceflight was gratuitously ceded to Russia and China.

Russia went for the cash, doubling its price for carrying an astronaut into orbit to $55.8 million. (Return included. Thank you, Boris.)

China goes for the glory. Having already mastered launch and rendezvous, the Chinese plan to land on the moon by 2025. They understand well the value of symbols. And nothing could better symbolize China overtaking America than its taking our place on the moon, walking over footprints first laid down, then casually abandoned, by us.

Who cares, you say? What is national greatness, scientific prestige or inspiring the young — legacies of NASA — when we are in economic distress? Okay. But if we’re talking jobs and growth, science and technology, R&D and innovation — what President Obama insists are the keys to “an economy built to last” — why on earth cancel an incomparably sophisticated, uniquely American technological enterprise?

I was ten when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.   The last time any human being walked on that nearest "planet" was Apollo 17 in December 1972 -- nearly forty years ago.   Imagine if you had asked any American in the early 1970s where the space program would be in forty years ago... would any of them have said defunct?

It's almost inexpressibly sad.   In the late 1940s the cry of the anti-Communists was "Who Lost China?"  

What I want to know is.... who lost Space?