Last Thursday in this space Editor-in-Chief Jeff Jeffrey wrote an opinion piece titled, “Space: The Pointless Frontier.” In this article Jeffrey listed his reasons why NASA should not pursue a return trip to the moon. He cited costs as the main reason and is of the opinion the money could be better spent on other endeavors. Now, some days it is impossible to know what each person at The Daily Reveille is working on. This was one of those days. I was preoccupied with another segment of the paper’s production and completely unaware Jeffrey was writing this opinion piece until it was put on the page. If I had known, I would have raised hell and done my best to distract him while he was writing. There are some issues Jeff and I disagree on, but none we have discussed at length and as passionately as whether space travel is worth the cost. Sneaking that article past me and onto the pages was sneaky, underhanded and downright brilliant. I wish I had thought of it. Fortunately I’m allowed space for rebuttal. Space travel touches us today in ways few other human endeavors can. Its emotional and spiritual effects reach beyond national borders and past racial boundaries. When the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat expressed his condolences not only to the families of the six Americans on board but to the family of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon. On July 17, 1975, during the height of the Cold War, American and Soviet spacecrafts docked hundreds of miles above the Earth. While the Iron Curtain was still tightly wrapped around Europe, these astronauts swapped gifts, ate together and toured each other’s ships. There is no time better for the world than right now to send a man to the moon, Mars or beyond. More than ever we’re being divided. Americans and Iraqis. Muslims and Christians. Fundamentalists and Fascists. Democrats and Republicans. The human race desperately needs a symbol like one of its brethren taking a small step on the moon. We need to be reminded that first and foremost we are all humans. Perhaps no one has ever better summed up the new perspective gained from space travel as the late astronomer and author Carl Sagan. In his 1985 book “Contact,” he imagined what it is like to view the Earth from space for the first time. “On every orbit, the Earth tells you new stories,” Sagan wrote. “You can see a volcanic eruption in Kamchatka, a Saharan sandstorm approaching Brazil, unseasonably frigid weather in New Zealand. You get to thinking of the Earth as an organism, a living thing. You get to worry about it, care for it, wish it well. National boundaries are as invisible as meridians of longitude, or the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. The boundaries are arbitrary. The planet is real.” Jeffrey cited NASA’s $17 billion budget in his article and thinks the money could be better spent elsewhere. I, of course, disagree. It is a lot of money, but when the United States has spent more than $300 billion on the war in Iraq, as the Associated Press reported this week, the sum does not sound unreasonable. One last story. When American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon July 21, 1969, they planted an American flag in the surface where it would stand for all time as a symbol of the United States’ victory in the space race. What most people don’t know is that flag is now lying in the lunar dust. As astronauts Deke Slayton and Alan Shepard detailed in their book “Moonshot,” Armstrong and Aldrin planted the flag too close to their lunar module. When the ascent engine fired to transport the astronauts back into lunar orbit, the flag toppled over from the shock of the blast. I don’t really dwell on that. Instead I think about something else they left on the lunar surface: a plaque which reads, “Here Men From Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We Came in Peace For All Mankind.” For All Mankind. In this time of international strife, wouldn’t it be nice to hear those words again on the beautiful sands of the Sea of Tranquility? I think it is worth the cost.
—–Contact Elliott Brown at [email protected]