NASA's long ordeal is nearly over. The space shuttle has again shown it can blast astronauts into orbit on biblical smoke pillars. There is much to admire in the sight of the astronauts circling the earth in their splendid reusable spaceship, but there is also something disappointing. For the past two decades the American space program has been going mainly in circles, riding a splendid shuttle to nowhere. Once upon a time NASA launched men to the moon and sent robots across the solar system; there was even brave talk of expeditions to Mars. Now that the nightmare is over, NASA needs a dream again.
Thursday morning, as I sat in front of the television watching NASA technicians worry the Discovery through its countdown, I ate a star for breakfast. The star was in the form of a waffle. It consisted mostly of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen, with a sprinkling of other elements. Except for the hydrogen, those atoms had been forged in a star that exploded and died long before our sun and solar system were born. The hydrogen was made in the big bang that allegedly began the universe. Some astronomers think that it was on dust grains floating in interstellar space that these atoms first assembled themselves into the organic molecules that are the forerunners of life, and that the water that is three-quarters of my body came from a comet.
My waffle and I, happily united by the time of lift-off, are stardust. So are we all. We don't have to go into space. We're already there and always have been, whirling about the sun at 18 miles per second, carrouseling around the galaxy, fleeing the other galaxies at millions of miles per hour. Rick Hauck and his comrades weren't going anywhere but home.
The power and allure of the space program, it seems to me, come from its connection with that giddy sense of the unknown. When we explore the universe, we explore ourselves. We seek the source of the cosmic-ray winds that mutate our genes and the comet showers that may periodically extinguish species; we seek the name of that star whose dust is under our fingernails. There is plenty of science in the space program, but the space program is not science; there is technological fallout, but it's not about technology. It's about, or should be about, consciousness and the mystery of our own destiny. The space truck to nowhere, sophisticated as it is, gets us to orbit but doesn't give us any lift.
The space program was last seen in the 1960s and early '70s, when the moon landings had to share television time with Viet Nam and burning ghettos. Since then, NASA, several Administrations and Congresses have found it politically * more expedient to build space hardware than to say what it is going to be used for. NASA and the nation have no program in space, no goal. It's as if the interstate highway system had been designed before the Louisiana Purchase and only went as far west as New Jersey. They build office parks where they need a truck stop. Most observers now agree that NASA's emphasis on the shuttle was a mistake. It tried to be all things to all people, cost $10 billion to develop and killed seven people. Nevertheless, NASA is pushing doggedly for an equally nebulous but even more expensive space station. What's it all for?