THERE WHERE THREE ENCOURAGING DEVELOPMENTS in the 1960s: The Civil Rights Movement, Motown Music, and the Space Program. The Civil Rights Movement has degenerated to a mad scramble to gather preferences from a racial spoils system, Motown Music is no longer what it once was and Rap Music is polluting the nation's air waves, and the Space Program stumbles along without vision and dwindling budgets.
This week marks the thirtieth anniversary of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon's Sea of Tranquility. For some the 1960s represent a time of innocence lost, when faith in collective enterprises led by the government became automatically suspect. For those interested in science and engineering, by contrast, those were heady times.
In the 1960s, scientists and engineers and in particular the explorer-astronauts became archetype American heroes. Not only were these people the vanguard of the Cold War, but they were explorers following in the steps of Lewis and Clark. John Kennedy challenged the country to go to moon within a decade and explained:
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills..."
Many currently practicing scientists and engineers, most involved in fields not even related to space research, were first enticed into their professions by the scientific excitement generated by the Space Program. It is impossible to follow all the scientific ripples created and all the commercial products contrived as a consequence of the heroic effort to travel to the moon.
There are certain enterprises that we can only pursue collectively. Space exploration is one. While there is no shortage of commercial applications; communications and navigation satellites are conspicuous ones; manned spaced exploration and the development of a space travel infrastructure is an endeavor that requires federal leadership.
In the jaded 1990s the conventional wisdom among scientists is that manned space flight takes funds away from purely scientific research. However, this is not an either or proposition. Frankly, without the manned spaced program, particularly in the 1960s, scientific missions would not have been considered. Ending manned space flight would save money, but it is a virtual certainty that such funds would not end up in scientific research.
While the country has experienced twenty years of growing prosperity, it has devoted fewer research dollars, both in a relative and absolute sense, on space exploration. Under the most optimistic scenario, NASA funding will remain level over the next four years and I am not optimistic.
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