I’ve been a fan of space and the NASA space program for most of my life. I was always a very imaginative kid, and it reflected mostly in the worlds I constructed as I played with toys. When I got into Star Trek around the start of Deep Space Nine, I would construct starships with Legos and run my own ship and crew within the universe. I was lucky to actually be able to go to Houston and visit Johnson Space Center with my family then, and it probably remains the most fun I’ve ever had on a trip, family or otherwise. I got to see a lot of the ISS in the final phases before the start of construction in space. We couldn’t get NASA TV at home, as it was a super-premium channel, but as the internet progressed, I took every chance I could to watch whatever was published online. When the final shuttle mission ended in July of 2011, STS-135 Atlantis, I stayed up late into the night and early morning to watch the landing live on NASA TV’s UStream. It was kind of a sad day in my life in some respects, because I grew up during the height of American space exploration and development, just as my parents grew up with the beginning of the American space engineering, and race to the moon. It sounds shallow, but I tend to believe that two generations of the greatest achievements of American history, were laid to rest when Atlantis touched down that morning.

You might say, “Why do you say that, the space program is still running!”

Sure, NASA is still there, and the space program continues. We had a lot of successful probe launches, the Mars Rovers, the continuing missions aboard the ISS. But it’s the bare minimum. The Hubble Telescope, one of our greatest and most resilient space instruments that have provided scientists valuable information about space, exists up there today in pretty good condition thanks to the efforts of STS-125, who performed rather dangerous EVAs to repair the Hubble when it was otherwise slated for decommissioning and destruction. Our shuttle program was the literal backbone of our space program, and it is the reason we built the ISS and flourished in space for thirty years. It’s regrettable that we lost two orbiters, Challenger and Columbia, and no one enjoys the human and technological cost of flying into orbit and beyond. But it’s the cost of performing great science. Hell, it’s the cost of living. Failure is important for anyone to understand in hopes of changing things and making it right. The problem is, failure outside of the space and scientific community is seen as an financial, and even spiritual ultimatum that mankind shouldn’t even bother with space. Just stay on earth. It’s safer. Never mind that you’re more likely to be killed in about three hundred different ways on the ground than you are in a rocket, but odds are for winners after all. Space was a big deal when I was a kid, and now, in an age of smartphones, streaming video, and information-on-demand, we’re living in this world where we consider everything to be explored sufficiently enough to where we don’t need to bother. Mars? Yeah, that’d be nice, but why bother? It’ll take us six months to get there! Deep space? Nope. More space stations? Eh.

We just don’t care. And why should we? We’re living the dream down here.

Oh wait.

What bothered me the most about the press conference held a little while ago at NASA was listening to reporters talk about things like the government slashing the budget for continued operations and research and development of further spacecraft, or how long it would take to “get back to flight”, or “How disappointed were those students to see their experiments explode for the second time?” Almost every question, even if not intentionally, tried to shake the confidence of SpaceX and NASA, as if to question why they’re even bothering to send anything into space. I heard a lot of the same shit back in 2003 when Columbia exploded, and it took NASA quite awhile to get back into space. In the meantime, we have to rely on the Russians, the EU, Japan, and other partners to get people and cargo up and down from the station. No one understands the cost and time necessary to research and develop new space technologies. They’ll say shit like “Well why can’t the Russians just do everything?” People don’t realize the Russians have been flying the same Soyuz system for forty-some years, and have experienced their own setbacks trying to develop new systems. You need not look further than their attempt at a shuttle-like system, Buran, abandoned after failed tests and cost-overun in the early 2000’s. We’re lucky that the Soyuz system has been very reliable and efficient to continue supporting the ISS, but it cannot last forever. The shuttle system was retired in 2011 because it was costly, and new systems were being developed. Ares and Orion were supposed to take over for the shuttles in getting supplies and people up and down from the station, and serve as the building blocks for missions beyond Earth. Unfortunately they were both easy causalities of the recession and other budget cutbacks. While I can understand that often you have to focus on home before you can focus beyond, as one of the directors in the conference stated, this sets back research and development, and indeed, it crippled the Ares program and set back Orion. When you look at the public perception, they don’t really care. Space is space, we’ve advanced so much technologically now that they think it’s easy, like magic, and that rocket science is just like building Legos and making them fly. No one understands how much effort it takes to get heavier and heavier payloads out of Earth’s atmosphere. Simulators like Kerbal Space Program may just be games, but they model fairly well how difficult it is to achieve orbit with a hand-built rocket. You can’t just slap an engine on a fuel tank and press go, you have to have stabilizers, aerodynamic controls, and enough thrust to get out of the planet’s gravity. Sometimes it takes me ten or even twenty attempts to get it right, each time going back and looking at what went wrong, and adding or removing parts to do something different. The only difference is I am playing a game. These people are doing it for real. You cannot have reward without risk, and anyone who tells you differently has some advantage you do not.

I’ve acknowledged long ago that space is not within my reach. In fact, my only regret to this day is not doing better in school to work for NASA, even if only to be an engineer. Because the fact is, for 99.8% of the world, none of us will see space in our lifetime, and that sucks. So I greatly admire the men and women who power our space programs and go into space, because they carry the hopes and dreams that someday we’ll get off this rock and explore the galaxy, see new things, and maybe meet new life. It’s my hope that the excitement of space returns for the next generation, because we need people to cheer our program on, and remind our lawmakers that space is still important and still worthy of time and money.