The Space Race - Thomas Stafford: "We choose to go to the moon. 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, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
John F. Kennedy
Rice University
Sept. 12, 1962 "

Whatever happened to this spirit of striving for the impossible because we perceive it to be so? The whole world seems to be sitting on its collective mikta, scratching its head and staring at its belly button. The vast, overwhelming majority of countries are focused on internal affairs, relations with other countries, etc., and that's all well and good. But if we ever want to go anywhere, we're going to have to put aside medicare, give up giving terrorists the attention they crave, and look up into the sky again.

Assuming I don't get arrested or anything for saying this (everyone's still so caught up in trying to identify terrorists that I've heard they're incringing on free speech now... 'course, that was IM...), America, at least, needs a rival nation, perhaps even one that can be a worthy adversary. And this adversary needs to reach to the sky, challenge us to beat him to Mars or Io. We need something to kick start NASA again.

And don't tell me that NASA hasn't become idle; I know about the shuttle program and the ISS. But a shuttle couldn't get a flea to the moon, let alone a person to the aformentioned moon of Jupiter. Not to mention that every time something goes wrong, we're on the brink of giving up. (You know, if NASA could get some support, that'd go a long way, too...)

What do we really expect to find up there in the highest reaches of our atmosphere? (The shuttles don't actually completely leave the atmosphere, by the way.) I mean, The Andromeda Strain makes foreign bacteria sound so interesting, but that's not why we're there. I'm sure it's cool and all that spider webs are clumpy in freefall. But where's the intrigue? So we've got experiments going. Wa hoo. Yipee. Can we get any further along in the matter of getting off this rock? I mean, Earth is great. Beautiful. Extremely, and I'm not just being sarcastic. But what if there's more we're missing out on or postponing just 'cause we're so caught up in how much tax we might have to pay or whether Bob and Judy are going to go out tomorrow or break up? What if something or someone is waiting for us to step out the front door, walk out to get the galactic newspaper, and meet the neighbors?

Even if there's no one out there or you believe that there isn't any other life (or intelligent life) in the universe (though it's getting to be kinda rare on Earth... if only sane people ran the world... Hey, we could ship all the politicians off to Mars to duke it out verbally for all time!), look at it this way. There's a whole universe out there. Each one of us is one person out of over six billion. Those six billion plus people all fit on this planet of ours with a few square miles to spare. Our planet is one of the smaller ones in the solar system. The closest star could fit millions of our precious world inside it, and it's not even a big one. There are thousands, if not millions, of stars in our galaxy. And this little galaxy we call the Milky Way (much more creative than "Sun" and "Moon" and if you think about it, "Earth") is one of thousands, probably millions, in our ever expanding universe. We are so small. Don't you think we could stand to take up a bit more space, especially if you think there's no chance of encringing on anyone else's turf?

And if you do think that there's gotta be someone else out there, wouldn't it be nice if we weren't the shy, solitary, skulky neighbors for once?

Since the mid 1800s, probably before then (those ancient rock signs in South America that can only be seen from helicopter or plane), people have been dreaming of going up, away, into the sky. Why not now? Why did we stop dreaming? Are we so caught up in our tiny, everyday lives that we can't stop and wonder what we're missing? The universe isn't empty; it's as full of beauty as our own planet Earth, if not more. Hubble keeps sending us beautiful nebulae, awe-inspiring galaxies. Not to sound way too cliche, but there are whole worlds out there to explore, other solar systems, other galaxies. And here we are fighting over who should be the next person to fill a role in a beaurocracy.

I'm almost done, promise.

People used to look up at the sky, imagining that the individual twinkling lights were gods. Later, they realized that those lights were burning spheres of gas, and deciding that that's not a very nice place to visit, turned their gazes to the moon. As early as 1865, people like Jules Verne imagined visiting the moon. They must have thought it impossible. Merely flying was hard enough, but to go so high as to reach an orbiting satellite must have seemed impossible. The task seems so outrageous that some people doubt we've even achieved it. But now we know that it's possible. We have a reliable way to get there and have gone six times starting with Apollo 11 and ending with Apollo 17.

We've gone there, done that. Now we need a new impossible task. And we need the motivation to achieve it. I pray that one day soon, we'll have both and the full and undivided support of our currently distracted nation.