One of the great adventures of all time

This is the real deal. For some of us, it's the end of the end. The magic is over. Space travel, the future we were promised, has been put on hold.

It was May of 1961 when Alan Shepard was shot into space in a tiny capsule on the back of a Redstone rocket. He could just as easily have blown up on the launching pad. I watched it, as did most of America, as it happened. Life stopped. They brought a television into my 7th Grade classroom, which was a big deal in and of itself. We held our breath and prayed. It was a Catholic school, so praying came naturally, but I’ll bet that everyone who watched it was praying. There were no atheists in American on that bright spring morning. It was only fifteen minutes, and it was suborbital, and we watched it from beginning to end, and even though Yuri Gagarin had outdone us not too long previously, it was still the beginning. Space had arrived.

Keep in mind that scientists had been working on rockets for quite some time now, and the idea of space flight was a public obsession. That was the definitive frame of the future, that we would fly out into space and learn and explore. We would break away from the Earth. It was the next step in our evolution. Schools that weren’t heavily teaching the sciences and creating the next generation of engineers to make this happen were not doing their job. We were coming off a decade of B movies where all the space travel was by metaphorical communists disguised as aliens, come to destroy the American way of life. The next decade would bring Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the American way of life would be as pioneers of the galaxy, and space was the final frontier.

When Apollo 11 landed on the moon that night in July in 1969, the dream was a reality.

The shuttle was to be the next step in this process. We would build a space station in permanent orbit, and travel to and fro in our shuttles with little or no fanfare, and this would be our launching pad to the planets. And from there…

The shuttles started flying in 1982. They ended last year.

The idea of space and pioneers and frontiers inspired more than one generation, but for so many reasons, we look elsewhere for our inspirations today. Perhaps the core reason is that, when you come down to it, the rewards of a space program are pretty small in terms of practical benefits. You put a lot of money in, and you don’t get a lot of money back out from it. The original space race was motivated by global Cold War politics, and money didn’t matter. But sooner or later there are just so many resources, and one has to decide how best to use them. Space, which for all practical purposes was for pure science, was not one of those best uses.

Pure science is the same as pure art. You don’t do it to make money. You don’t do it for glory. You don’t do it to beat somebody else at it. You do it because it’s there, and because you have to. Art for art’s sake. Science for science’s sake. Philosophers can attempt to explain these, but we intuitively know them for what they are. They are the best, and most difficult, aspirations of the human spirit, to know and to create beyond what has even been known or created in the past. And it diminishes us when we cut off an outlet to those aspirations. The end of our dedication to space is one of those cut-offs.

Space will continue to happen. Private enterprise will give it a shot. Other countries than the US, as part of their development and self-determination, will give it a shot. Eventually the US will probably get back into it with all heart and soul and give it another shot. It’s not over, not by a long shot. But it is hibernating for a while.

So today was one of those really sad days, where we know that we have lost something. But only for a while. Kids will visit the Enterprise on their school trips to Manhattan, or roam through the Air and Space Museum in Washington, or visit any number of other science venues throughout the country, and the dream’s embers will continue to glow just a little bit. And from those embers, some day new flames will rise. So while shedding a bittersweet tear for the lost dreams of the past, one holds on to the promise of new dreams for the future. As JFK put it, It is one of the great adventures of all time.

An adventure postponed, for the moment.