Re-race to space

Last Wednesday, the first prototype in a new generation of rockets successfully blasted off from its platform at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The test of the Ares 1-X rocket stands as the first milestone reached in Project Constellation, NASA’s ambitious plan to return human beings to the moon by 2020.

It’s about time.

The last time the United States sent a manned spacecraft to the moon was the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Thirty-seven years have now passed, and not a soul has moved beyond a near-Earth orbit.

Mankind has pondered the design and complexities of space since the earliest recorded histories. Astronomers from numerous civilizations throughout countless eras kept detailed records of the movement of stars and planets and other celestial bodies. As scientific thought and discovery began to trickle down to the masses, authors began to write stories based on mankind’s treks to the stars (or their wars in the stars, if you prefer).

In the 1960s, space travel stood as the ultimate expression of mankind’s progress in understanding and taming the universe. We had already ceased to be bound by the earth in terms of our thoughts, and now we were aiming to overcome the physical shackles that tethered us to our terrestrial home. Gravity was our enemy, and we were determined to best it.

Unfortunately, the race to overcome on a cosmic scale was quickly overshadowed by the race to overcome oppressions of our own designs here on Earth. The United States and Soviet Union used the Space Race as a political vehicle to tout the dominance of their respective nations, rather than the triumph of mankind as a whole.
We allowed our visions of flying cars and cities on the moon to fall to the wayside as childish notions and buried ourselves in geocentric thoughts.

But the geeks at NASA never got the message. Bad PR from failed missions and tragic accidents compounded the public’s disinterest in their programs, their public support started to wane and their funding dropped to a fraction of the Apollo mission days, but they kept on launching satellites and studying cosmic phenomena the likes of which most people will never comprehend.

That is exactly why Project Constellation carries such importance. The public needs to rekindle its love for outer space, and these missions give us an opportunity to do just that.

It was never politics that drove mankind to venture from the earth in the first place. We need to realize that space is still the final frontier.

The mission to the moon is just the first step. The moon should be nothing but a pit stop on our way out toward the rest of the universe. Human beings need to travel as far from this planet as we can, and then let the next generation take us that much further.
Behind every NASA satellite launched, there have been thousands of people involved in its development. Let’s take out the middleman and see the universe for ourselves.