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Richard Nixon claimed his part just as soon as he became President. He eagerly plugged into the moon landing, talking by phone to Neil Armstrong and Edwin ("Buzz") Aldrin on the lunar surface. "This certainly has to be the most historic phone call ever made." It was even more, and Nixon knew it. He launched a global diplomatic odyssey timed to take advantage of the Apollo 11 success. His itinerary placed him on the aircraft carrier Hornet just as the moon crew was fished out of the ocean and lifted onto the TV screens of people all over the globe. Without the continuing spectaculars in space, Nixon's demise because of Watergate would have produced even more of a national trauma than it did.
There was, at the apex of detente during Gerald Ford's Administration, a brief hope that space could become a bridge rather than a barrier between the superpowers. In 1975 astronauts and cosmonauts aboard an Apollo and a Soyuz spacecraft linked in a display of heavenly symbolism. But such episodes proved to be merely minor exceptions to the rule that space was inevitably where the superpowers would extend their rivalry.
Ronald Reagan has never been a space buff, the kind of fellow who loves to talk gadgetry and hankers to go weightless. He does not know that much about the byways of the solar system. But his sense of American pride has been almost faultless. He has understood intuitively that people must have a challenge that takes them out of the despair that crowds every day. There must be a new frontier beckoning, promising some new hope. He even sees space as a way, in his words, "to render nuclear weapons obsolete." But his proposal to build and perhaps share satellite-based missile defense shields failed to produce the superpower cooperation he says he envisioned. Indeed, it provoked one of the deepest disputes between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
When the debate over whether to build a manned space station came to the Cabinet Room in late 1983, James Beggs, NASA administrator, heard argument after argument against the project. He studied Reagan's face throughout the meeting. Walking out the door, a colleague remarked gloomily, "I guess we lost that one." Replied Beggs: "No, we won it. I could tell from the President's eyes." Beggs was right. Reagan felt the challenge of the hat over the wall. And last week, at the memorial service for Challenger's crew, he proclaimed yet again his determination to build the manned space station as planned.
John Logsdon, George Washington University's space policy expert, has studied the program and its relationship to the American people. After last week's disaster, he noted that in many sports arenas, when they play the national anthem, among the images flashed on the big screens is that of the shuttle. "It's one of our most common national symbols now," he said. "Right after the bald eagle." Along with its predecessors, stretching back to the first Redstone rockets, it remains even now a symbol of America's common bond as a nation, in times of both triumph and tragedy.