THE END OF THE DREAM?

By Andrew Williams

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-term exploration of space.

"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 this goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills."-John F Kennedy, 1961

These words, spoken just over forty years ago, still send chills up and down my spine. For science-fiction fans of the time, it was a dream come true: the leader of the United States of America was articulating what they had been feeling and advocating for decades. It was truly the beginning of the New Frontier.

Now, with the onslaught of Gestapo tactics here and around the world, it seems that the dream is being forgotten, abandoned. No longer do we speak of soaring to the stars. Now the talk is of security and secrecy. Perestroika and glasnost are words gathering dust in dictionaries.

To those who have always criticized the space program, trumpeting time and again the cliché that the money spent on space could be better spent here on Earth, this comes as a Pyrrhic victory. The price of losing the space race is "perpetual war for perpetual peace," a phrase coined by historian Harry Elmer Barnes. The price for that victory is far too high.

The space program, for all its warts and wens, has revolutionized technology and society. There's hardly a piece of telecommuncation or computer equipment in your home and workstation that isn't the offspring of technology developed for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. In order to get men to the Moon as quickly and efficiently as possible, everything had to be small and (where feasible) mobile. Hence the switches from transistors to printed circuits to microcircuitry, and beyond.

It revolutionized medicine as well. Think of all the modern scanning devices that have taken so much guesswork out of diagnosis and treatment. MRI's, CAT scanners, and their ilk all grew out of technology developed to monitor astronaut health on Earth, in space and on Luna.

And all of that for-literally-pennies a day. As of the 1980's, the Department of Health and Human Services was spending in a day what NASA spent in a year. (What with all the budget cuts NASA's endured since then, that figure is probably about the same or even lower.) And yet the Senators and the people were screaming about the waste of resources, of how the money spent on space could be used to feed and house the poor. What they were-and are-ignorant of is the myriad ways in which space research can be used to address problems at home.

For example, food. We have a space station. Why not use part of it as a hydroponics bay to find new ways to grow fruits and vegetables using less resources? Why not set up a hydroponics station exclusively dedicated to growing food for the hungry? As for shelter, the methods used for constructing space vehicles and stations could potentially be applied to building cheap, safe housing for the homeless.

What we are suffering from-and have been for some time-is not a lack of resources, but a lack of imagination and gumption. We've watched our horizons shrink, and we've let them be shrunk by those who think themselves in power. As a result, our dreams have been deferred. And anyone familiar with the Langston Hughes poem knows what can happen to deferred dreams.

But I refuse to give up on the dream. If the US government is more concerned with war than exploration, than the citizenry will have to take up the cudgel. There's more than enough imagination and scientific talent in this country alone to create businesses that tie together space exploration and transportation of resources. Several such companies already exist. One of them, TGV, created by Patrick Bahn, is working on ways to finance low Earth orbit (sub-orbital) vehicles to be used to transport goods, people and services.

The dream ain't over, as the Yogi said, until it's over. Just because our so-called leaders have "no sense of wide-screen vision"* doesn't mean we don't.

www.tgv-rockets.com

www.peterhammill.com

(*--Peter Hammill, "A Kick To Kill The Kiss")