Happy Birthday NASA! While you gathered on Wednesday in celebration of your 50th anniversary, the U.S. House of Representatives prepared a nice little present for you -- permission to shell out precious U.S. tax dollars to the Russians so you can get our astronauts to and from the space station, which is finally nearly finished after decades of work and $100 billion. I know you must be thrilled. You're probably just too exhausted to show it. For despite your best efforts to put on a happy face, more than a few of you took advantage of the birthday bash at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia to mention the obvious: Things ain't that great.
Your quintessential American hero John Glenn was the first to comment on the emperor's lack of clothes, noting that now that America finally has this incredible laboratory in orbit, there's no money to do any research. Glenn even had the ill-manners to point out that the U.S. might have to abandon the outpost after the shuttle is retired in 2010.
“In January 2004 the president directed a new mission for NASA to go to the moon and Mars,” said Glenn. “I thought it was great except for one thing -- the money did not follow.”
Fellow luminary Neil Armstrong, who seldom appears at public events, chose to focus on a higher calling, saying that one of the most important roles of government is to motivate its citizens, especially young people.
"NASA will rank in the top tier of government enterprises in that regard," said Armstrong, who commanded the first mission to land astronauts on the moon. "Our goal – indeed our responsibility – is to develop new options for future generations: options in expanding human knowledge, exploration, human settlements and resource development, outside in the universe around us.
"Our highest and most important hope is that the human race will improve its intelligence, its character, and its wisdom, so that we'll be able to properly evaluate and choose among those options, and the many others we will encounter in the years ahead," Armstrong said.
Agency administrator Michael Griffin then took the stage, filling a role that he has become altogether too familiar with -- the axeman. "As you walk out of this museum, look at the SR-71," he told the crowd. "We do not have one of those anymore. My tie shows an astronaut flying in a MMU (manned maneuvering unit for spacewalking) and an Apollo spacecraft. We do not have those anymore either.
"There is nothing odd about looking at old hardware in museums," he said. "But only in American aerospace can we go to a museum and look at certain artifacts and wish that we could do as well today. That should sober all of us here."
Griffin moved on to note the upcoming launch of China's third manned space mission, one that will put more Chinese in orbit at one time than the current number of Americans (one.)
"Next week, the Chinese will outnumber the number of Americans and Russians in space - separately or together. Good on the Chinese," Griffin said.
"On our 50th anniversary we are not celebrating the 20th anniversary of our first landing on Mars -- but we could have been," he said.
Not that Griffin’s ungrateful for Congress' gift -- quite the contrary. He’s just incredulous that the BEST this country can hope for is to fork over money to the Russians so the U.S. can buy seats to the station that it built.
"This will be a victory because all of the other outcomes are worse. That's the situation we find ourselves, for what the Columbia Accident Investigation Board referred to as a sustained loss of vision for the American space program and what it ought to be," he said.
Still, you people at NASA are such optimists.
Griffin said that at the agency's 100th anniversary -- even with only an inflation-adjusted budget -- NASA could be marking the 20th anniversary of a manned landing on Mars. "It requires that we act with
unusual persistence -- for Americans -- and that we stay the course, and that we stay true to
what it is we believe the proper goals are for our agency into our children's and grandchildren's time."
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