Carla Garrison

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WASHINGTON,  July 22, 2011 - Lewis Gizzard, American writer and humorist, wrote a book titled Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself. That title encapsulates the beat down, disappointed feeling many Americans had yesterday when mission control said, "Job well done, America," as Astronaut Doug Hurley pulled off a picture perfect, final landing of Atlantis. 

Space Shuttle Atlantis' final landing (Image: NASA)

Fifty years after Navy Commander Alan Shepard, Jr. piloted Freedom 7 to become the first American in outer space, we are turning space exploration leadership over to the Russians.  

America has been in a downward spiral for too long. Our leaders in Congress and the White House continue to choose paths that have already been proven wrong by history on everything from giving up leadership on space travel to economic policy. A United States of America was created for just the kind of capacity it took to inspire millions around the world with space flight. Yet, today it seems our focus is spending more borrowed money for more and bigger entitlement programs. 

Who over the age of forty didn’t feel a twinge yesterday, a longing for a leader like President John F. Kennedywho in 1962 told a crowd at Rice University, “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”  

What happened to being the people who choose to do what’s hard because it is the right thing to do?

The Russians are thrilled 

A Russian space agency official said, "From today, the era of the Soyuz has started in manned space flight, the era of reliability."

Soyuz TMA-9 launch in 2007

Soyuz does not hold a candle to Atlantis, yet the Russians charge NASA $63 million per seat. It’s our only way to the space station now.

Tom Koch, CBS News reporter interviewed former Johnson Space Center Director George Abbey who said, "I think the United States by giving up the shuttle is making a serious mistake because technologically, it's the most advanced space vehicle in the world, and really there is no reason not to continue to fly it,"

"Here we've got really the greatest vehicle in the world, and we are giving it up," Abbey said. "Don't start a whole new type of architecture that causes you to go back and start flying capsules, which we gave up many years ago." 

What next for NASA

It was six years ago under the Bush Administration that a decision was made to shut the shuttle program down. The Obama Administration concurred.

“Mars is firmly in our sights,” said  NASA Administrator Charles Bolden this week. “Curiosity [the proposed Mars vehicle] not only will return a wealth of important science data, but it will serve as a precursor mission for human exploration to the Red Planet.” 

Bolden told Al Jazeera in 2009 that “perhaps” his “foremost” objective laid out by President Obama as NASA chief was “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.” 

Maybe NASA is working on that task.

 “It’s time to move on and focus on the future,” said Kennedy Space Center Director Robert Cabana.

 “You cannot continue to do the same thing, and expect to do something else better,” he says. “In the austere budget times we have, we cannot afford to fly the space shuttle and still work on future programs.”

...We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard... President John F. Kennedy, Rice University (1962)

The plan for when and how has yet to be delivered. 

According to the NASA website, they are designing and building the capabilities to send humans to explore the solar system, working toward a goal of landing humans on Mars and will soon announce the design for the heavy-lift Space Launch System that will carry us out of low Earth orbit.  

Kennedy got it 

Kennedy believed that Americans could go to the moon when we were still using slide rules and hand calculations. He also saw the connection between space exploration and defense.  

According to the JFK Library, Kennedy got what he expected: successes. Shepard successfully launched into space and returned safely. Then in 1962, pilot Marine Capt. John Glenn orbited the Earth three times. Overnight, the U.S. was catching up to Russia in manned space exploration. 

Kennedy cast the American goals in the space race in league with other great achievements of civilization. The JFK Library explains of that time, “Kennedy was truly shooting for the stars.” 

Today, we seem to be shooting from the hip. 

Carla Garrison follows current events with one eye on history and the other on the future.  Her goal is to encourage people to know the truth and use it as a call to personal action. 

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