The space program: Is Mars the next logical step?

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” said The Economist. Forty years ago this week, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon, a captivated audience on Earth swooned over the grainy, black-and-white TV images, and there seemed to be no limit to humanity’s dreams. But ever since that magical moment, the U.S. space program has been adrift, beset by “hand-wringing and uncertainty.” So instead of probing deeper into the solar system, said the Orlando Sentinel in an editorial, we’ve settled for circling the Earth aboard Skylab, the International Space Station, and the space shuttle, performing trivial experiments. “NASA needs to get its groove back.”

It’s trying—without much success, said Curtis Krueger in the St. Petersburg, Fla., Times. President George W. Bush gave NASA a new mission five years ago, with a plan to build a base on the moon by 2020, and then send a manned mission to Mars. NASA is now close to testing two new launch vehicles, Ares and Orion, for a return to the moon. Still, it’s hard not to feel that without the Cold War urgency of a space race against the Soviets, “everything is different.” Of course it is, said Tom Wolfe in The New York Times. Beating the Russians to the moon was the whole point of Apollo. Once that was accomplished, it became obvious that we’d taken “one giant leap to nowhere.”

To rekindle the excitement we all felt in 1969, said former Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin in The Washington Post, NASA should set its sights on Mars. There’s no point in pouring resources into returning to the moon, which is “a lifeless, barren world.” The Red Planet is a giant mystery package waiting to be unwrapped. Unmanned probes have revealed that beneath its soil “may lie trapped frozen water, possibly with traces of still-extant primitive life forms.” Its windswept surface and polar ice caps could offer insights into our own changing climate. By setting a goal of establishing a human colony on this tantalizing laboratory by 2030, we could inspire a new generation of students and scientists to “think boldly” about the future—just as we did with Apollo.

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And where do we find the hundreds of billions of dollars to pay for a Mars program? asked Bill Chameides in Huffingtonpost.com. We can get all the information we need about Mars and more distant targets with unmanned probes, at a fraction of the cost of sending up astronauts. Witness the stellar performance of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Mars Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Sure, it’s cool to send intrepid astronauts filled with the right stuff off on adventures to other worlds. But with so many expensive problems here on Earth, “is ‘cool’ enough of a reason?”

We had expensive problems in the 1960s, too, said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post. In fact, if man had waited to eliminate disease, poverty, and prejudice before taking on grand explorations, “we’d still be living in caves.” We don’t go to space for some practical reason or the scientific spinoffs these missions produce. “We go for the wonder and glory of it.” From the moment an astronaut saw the Earth rise in the moon’s black sky, “mankind has looked at itself in a different way,” said the Chicago Sun-Times. On that day, our fractious planet was united in joy and wonder, and humanity knew it was capable of grand—even impossible—things. Isn’t it time we proved that again?