Source: Dallas News
Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 not only thrilled movie audiences by taking them back to man’s reach for the moon; it also recalled an era when America faced a goal boldly and accepted nothing short of success.
But for how much longer? Discovery landed yesterday after a 15-day mission to the International Space Station. Three flights remain before the space shuttle program expires in September.
The next step was to have been a return to more ambitious manned flight, including lunar missions that would have been a springboard to human footprints on Mars.
We should have been on Mars 20 years ago. But a nation wrapped up in Vietnam and the usual full plate of domestic concerns lost sight of the value of man on other worlds. That probably happened the moment we officially beat the Russians to the lunar surface. Three Apollo missions were canceled to make way for a manned space station (Skylab) and the fledgling shuttle program.
But as President Barack Obama visited the hallowed ground in Florida where every American astronaut has left the planet, his vision did not include a desire for man’s next great leap.
Project Constellation is dead. This bold vision, the first step in extending the human habitat to the moon and beyond, has been cut from the next budget year.
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