China’s manned space program scored a major advance this week as they launched three astronauts to an orbiting space lab for a brief stay in orbit. It may surprise many Americans that not only does China have a manned space program but they have a small space station with plans to build a larger one in the future. The Chinese space effort is a well planned incremental program that is testing hardware and developing capabilities for an ever more ambitious national goal of becoming a preeminent spacefaring nation. This is in contrast to the American manned space program that now relies on the generosity and goodwill of other countries to send astronauts to orbit.
Longtime readers of this blog will know that I’ve discussed this topic before in the context of the U.S. role in the world (here and here), mostly to lament the demise of a manned program that had once been the envy of the world. Of course, it’s not entirely correct to say that the U.S. no longer has a manned space program. We regularly send astronauts to the International Space Station on Russian rockets and have interesting if vague plans to do something in the future with asteroids or maybe landing on a moon of Mars. But after President Bush ended the shuttle program and President Obama ended the program that was to replace it (the Constellation program), the days of the kinds of NASA missions that capture the public imagination and speak to a national destiny in space seem to be long gone.
It’s not as if we no longer have the capability to think big. Just this last week astronaut Buzz Aldrin shared his vision for space exploration in an op-ed in The New York Times in which he called for an international effort to colonize the moon based on the model used to build the ISS and a renewed American effort to go to Mars. Aldrin wrote:
A second “race to the Moon” is a dead end. America should chart a course of being the leader of this international activity to develop the Moon. The United States can help other nations do things that they want to do, a fruitful avenue for U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy. […] U.S. resources are better spent on moving toward establishing a human presence on Mars. I envision a comprehensive plan that would lead to permanent human settlement on Mars in the next 25 years. To get under way, the International Space Station can serve as a test bed for long-duration life support and for technologies that can safely, reliably and routinely transport crews to the distant shores of Mars.”
If anyone can put this kind of grand space strategy on the agenda, it’s Buzz Aldrin, but is anyone listening? NASA has plans, of course, and if you listen to the current administrative leadership of NASA you will no doubt come to feel that the civilian space effort is making great strides (and they are), while NASA dreams of long-term missions (maybe to an asteroid) in search of budget funds. Still, it’s clear from their public statements that the U.S. has a tag-along space program. Regarding possible future lunar missions, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden recently said, “If somebody else is going, we will provide our engineering expertise and the only condition is that I be allowed to send an astronaut as a part of the crew.” We will tag along with the Russians to the space station, and may tag-along with others (maybe China?) to the moon. Can we do no better?
We could do better, but it would take leadership to make the case in these times of austerity that the U.S. remains a spacefaring country and lay out in persuasive terms the scientific, technological, strategic, and economic (jobs!) benefits of an active manned space program. I’ve seen very little indication that such leadership is likely. In fact, I’m very worried that our current space program is what “leading from behind” looks like in space. Can we do better? Yes, we can.
