When the shuttle landed
A more modest future for NASA lies ahead
For Angelenos, it was a sight like no other. To me, it was a very comforting sight. For several hours this morning, the whole of California was entranced by the wonders of science. In Los Angeles, news stations treated the Space Shuttle Endeavor's fly-by goodbye as if it were sacred, blowing out their schedule for hours of live coverage.
As the shuttle, piggybacked aboard and trailed by F-16s and a photo plane, entered Northern California airspace, drivers on the highway here got out of their car and gawked. The California Highway Patrol didn't mind: They shut down the major highways to allow for an unfettered appreciation of something sublime. From Disney to Universal to Downtown LA to the office towers of El Segundo to the beaches of Malibu, the city stopped.
It was awesome. It was also, for NASA, an incredible PR coup, and scientific nationalism at its best. You wouldn't know that this was the final goodbye to the era of government-backed space exploration.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
I grew up in Central Florida. When I was eight, my classmates and I watched from the lawn of our school as the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. Whenever the shuttle went up, class went out.
NASA scientists came to my high school to demonstrate the technology of their heat-deflecting tile shields. I attended Space Camp (and was chosen as the "commander" of the mission). We learned about the moonshot, the technological applications from space experiments, about the effects of space travel on humans. We met astronauts. I couldn't understand this as a kid, but mainstays of the economy where I lived were tourists (Disney!), the Shuttle program, and the military. The National Reconnaissance Office launches its classified payloads from the Kennedy Space Center too. Martin-Marietta made nuclear targeting packages for the military before merging with Lockheed Martin.
For the first time in NASA history, there is no follow-up to the Shuttle program. NASA is re-orientating itself to support private space exploration and its international programs. There's still a fairly hefty budget for missions to Mars, to the physically-weird LaGrange points around Earth, and to field telescopes for deep-space exploration. But the next generation of human space exploration is not in NASA's budget. It was supposed to be called Constellation, and it envisioned another moon landing by 2020. The current administration killed it. The money for NASA has to be spent "smartly," President Obama said when he tried to justify his budget cuts. Commercial space companies will partner with NASA now.
In a sense, NASA cannot hover above reality, and it is hard to justify space travel based on economics alone. NASA PR managers and the legion of contractors that work on the programs there have lists of real-world applications derived from the process of building, launching, and recovering space vehicles, and even more derived from experiments done in space. But frankly, the money argument doesn't net out. The best argument I know of for a robust NASA budget is the one that Neil DeGrasse Tyson advances.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
It's similar to the argument that holds that affirmative action is good because diversity is simply good; it is an end to itself.
Tyson says that space exploration is worth the "shift in attitude that it brings upon our culture, where people then see and feel the role that innovations in science and technology play in their lives. They embrace that as a part of the identity of our culture itself." NASA, he says, is a frontier.
Maybe (sorry, Star Trek), the final frontier. Space exploration is good because space exploration is a good that marks a sophisticated and advanced society.
You will hear this phrase from advocates for a big space budget a lot: "frontier for humanity." It sounds ooey-gooey. But today, watching Los Angeles come together, marveling at the shuttle, I think there may be something to it.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.
-
Nuclear near-misses
The Explainer From technical glitches to fateful split-second decisions, the world has come to the brink of nuclear war more times than you might think
By Rebecca Messina, The Week UK Published
-
What is cloud seeding and did it cause Dubai's severe rainfall?
The Explainer The future is flooded
By Devika Rao, The Week US Published
-
American Airlines pilots are warning of a 'significant spike' in safety issues
In the Spotlight The pilot's union listed 'problematic trends' they say are affecting the airline's fleet
By Justin Klawans, The Week US Published
-
Why Puerto Rico is starving
The Explainer Thanks to poor policy design, congressional dithering, and a hostile White House, hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable Puerto Ricans are about to go hungry
By Jeff Spross Published
-
China is now just another autocracy
The Explainer On the long-lasting consequences of Xi Jinping's power grab
By Noah Millman Published
-
Is America the main obstacle to peace in Korea?
The Explainer There's only one way Korea would unify — and the United States won't stand for it
By Noah Millman Published
-
Why on Earth does the Olympics still refer to hundreds of athletes as 'ladies'?
The Explainer Stop it. Just stop.
By Jeva Lange Last updated
-
Berlin's wall and ours
The Explainer What that signifier of the Cold War indicates about our unsettled historical moment
By Noah Millman Published
-
The catastrophe in Yemen
The Explainer A Saudi Arabian blockade has left millions of civilians starving, and without fuel or clean water. What is this conflict about?
By The Week Staff Published
-
China's strongman
The Explainer Xi Jinping is China's most powerful leader in decades. What are his plans for the country — and the world?
By The Week Staff Published
-
How to ride out the apocalypse in a big city
The Explainer So you live in a city and don't want to die a fiery death ...
By Eugene K. Chow Published