Refocus on NASA

When I was a young tot, I wanted to be an astronaut. Remember when all little kids went through that stage? Being an astronaut was basically the coolest profession that anyone could aspire to have.

But after our peers (people currently 18 to 24 years old) grew up, those toddler dreams dissipated. Watching any relative or younger person grow up, it’s evident not one of them mentioned wanting to work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration fly to the moon, pilot rocket ships – you know, the whole nine yards.

The lack of interest in space exploration from younger folks is not surprising. After such a rousing start, NASA hasn’t really accomplished jack in the last 35 years. Through Wernher von Braun, the great space race with the USSR and President Kennedy’s vision of NASA as a catalyst for United States achievement in space, but also in technology and world relations, NASA stood for something until the 1970s.

Sure, we made it to the moon for the first time in 1969, but that should have been the beginning of something, not the end. Kennedy’s assassination probably had a lot to do with that, but it is disappointing to realize that since we landed on the moon 40 years ago, not much else has been accomplished.

That needs to change.

President Obama certainly has an otherworldly amount of responsibilities and concerns in front of him. However, he should devote significant resources to NASA and the possible exploration of something besides the moon, which we’ve sort of neglected after we finished the photo ops way back when. Planets like Mars could help facilitate answers or improvements for other problems.

Throughout the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s, we have been subject to the lackluster shuttle program, including various live telecast accidents like the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, all the while NASA’s budget was being trimmed, or “streamlined.” Even the shuttle launches that took off successfully didn’t return much groundbreaking data to the people – at least not enough to get them excited.

In the Kennedy era, we were jazzed about NASA and going to the moon. And while a lot of that can be attributed to hysteria surrounding “boldly going where no man has ever gone before,” why couldn’t President Obama push us toward something similar with Mars?

The technology has to be better than it was in 1969. And if it is not sufficient yet, chances are the steps we would take to get there would help create new technologies used here on the ground. If you don’t believe that, drop NASA an e-mail and it will freely mail you a 200-page book that graphically describes all the technologies created in the last 50 years  because of work NASA has done.

We don’t need to find extraterrestrials or water on Mars. We need to take steps to improve NASA so that the general populace is excited enough to believe those things are possible. We need kids to want to be astronauts again.