CADCA

It may be human nature to revere the sexy things in life. I often hear the Hubble Telescope mentioned when someone is defending the money spent on the Shuttle Program. And there is no question that amazing device has changed much of what we know about everything around us, even virtually going back thru time.

Yet I think I tripped over something much more significant, in comments Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's person responsible for Human Spaceflight, made during a press conference at KSC recently, as they wind up STS-135.

When asked what he thought we gained, his response, greatly paraphrased and condensed by me, was this: 'what we got from the Shuttle Program is the knowledge and confidence to know that, whatever it takes to build and maintain human habitat in space, American ingenuity, in concert with other nations, can do it.

It took 15 years and around 50 STS missions, not to mention the human toll of which we are all too aware, to be able to make that statement. And that means to me that it has been well-proven.

Now when someone like Elon Musk wants to help mankind make the leap, we know that he can be part of a team capable of assured survival, and real ability, when they get where ever it is they are going.

I think that's a pretty strong argument to say that the Shuttle fleet will, in time, be remembered as having been the inclined plane that raised us to a place where we can successfully go - guess where - where no one has gone before.

STS 132 Atlantis coming in on KSC 33
Credit: LB/BLueSawtooth

Our leaders have chosen not to work together, allowing themselves to be separated by dogma and philosophy, while we all float in the same boat. As a result, the American Space Program has never been consistently directed or funded.

At the same time, all the program stakeholders failed pretty miserably at communicating that much that is fundamental to current technology, has been launched from the Cape. All the payloads that flew here loom large in the chain that gives us our ʻe-ed ʼ up lives.

We must now depend on the good graces (and whopping bills) of a country whose interests are often not ours, to get a greatly diminished number of our folks up to the 100B$ ISS, where others now reap the fruits of our labors.

How do we fix this lousy hole we are in?

Since politics is inherent in the forming of our policy decisions, the Leadership, all up, of the US, must agree on a phaseable goal to colonize the Moon, the most convenient (close, laden with life-giving raw materials, and easily buildable) platform to extend homo sapiens ability to live where there is no air. Then on to mining asteroids and heading out to the next outpost, Mars, once we have settled Luna.

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter/ Lunar Impact,
onboard an Atlas 5 at KSC Pad 41
Credit: LB/BlueSawtooth