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The Ares has landed.” The radio crackles at mission control in Houston, Texas, on July 20, 2019, the 50th anniversary of the Eagle’s landing on the moon. For the first time in history, human beings walk on a planet that isn’t named Earth, as they tread the rust-colored dust of Mars. President Bush envisioned as much on the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 1989, when he pledged a manned trip to Mars by 2019. |
The Pathfinder snapped stunning pictures like these in 1997. Will the recent disappearance of the Polar Lander prolong plans for a human walking on Mars? (http://www.exploringmars.org) |
But no sooner had Bush set forth
his “journey into tomorrow” – less ambitious, perhaps, than John
F. Kennedy’s deadline for a moon landing less than a decade before Neil
Armstrong took one small step – than it nose-dived in the face of economic
reality.
The best plan at the time, which called for a
trip based from a space station orbiting Earth (ten years later, it’s still
being assembled), ran a price tag into the hundreds of billions.
Congress quickly deflated NASA’s budget for the project, relegating the
dream to an underground Internet network of Mars buffs frowning at computer
simulations, in the world’s largest science fair.
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of planners, all insisting we can beat Bush’s deadline by more than a decade.
One is Robert Zubrin, who shaved billions of dollars off NASA’s bill by
utilizing elements and gravitational forces present in
space and on Mars instead of hauling all the supplies from Earth. “We know what it would take to get a crew safely to Mars and back,” Zubrin says. “And we have the basic technology to do it.” But chalkboard calculations translate poorly to
actual space flight, and big dreams can be quickly squashed by a miserly
Congress, as Bush found out. NASA’s plan to hurl aging hero John
Glenn back into orbit last year illustrated how desperate the agency is
to rejuvenate interest in space exploration. Waning interest among
the general public – and in Congress, where space funds are handed over
grudgingly – perhaps more than any
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 'We know what it would
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Things changed as the
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Space is called
The Final Frontier, since it is the only remaining unknown. Once
we explored our way past all the frontiers of Earth, we had to look up
to the sky for a new one. But things changed as the frontier shifted
heavenward. No longer was it an irresistible force, a vivid dream,
a tantalizing promise of freedom.
“Eastward I go only by force,” Thoreau said, “But westward I go free.” John Timmerman says this spirit of freedom breathes in the west. “The vast space represents a primitive psychological or spiritual power whereby humanity is stripped of conventional routines and is forced to confront him or herself in a profound encounter.” He says the classic western, with this in mind, “permits and guides a sense of renewal and redirection. These … rise from the west itself as a living organism.” Gary Kamiya describes the west as “the fable that
we can never quite reach. It is where the sun is always setting and
the future always rising. It is America’s essential myth.”
Today, we don’t seem to have any essential myths. We are duly intrigued
with outer space, but not mystified, partly content to let satellites go
ahead of us and catch the virgin glimpses of the unknown, partly pacified
by the intimidating barrier between our world and ones beyond. Any
sense of outer space as our central hope – as a living, breathing, driving
force – seems to have been left behind once the frontier moved past the
stratosphere, and the Last Frontier became the Lost Frontier.
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