Shooting for the Moon

Ever since the astronauts last set foot on the moon in 1972, people have been waiting for NASA to take its next “great leap for mankind.”

The agency, after all, seemed to stumble in the 1980s, when it began pouring money into the International Space Station, a $100-billion boondoggle that has caused plenty of headaches but done little to advance science. President Bush has rightly asked NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe to rein in the station’s latest cost overruns. O’Keefe, however, does not appear ready to scale back the agency’s vision. Nor should he.

This month, at the second World Space Congress in Houston, NASA unveiled an ambitious blueprint for the future: a space station near the moon that would be a staging point for building and servicing space telescopes and for launching manned explorations to Mars and the rest of the solar system.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has no delusions that Congress will fund the mission any time soon: It hasn’t even put a price tag on it. But at the convention of 13,000 international engineers, scientists and policymakers, NASA tried to do something interesting and significant: hold out a bold and idealistic vision at a time when many Americans have become parsimonious with their higher dreams, thinking them foolish at a time of earthly woes.

President Kennedy similarly tried to milk courage out of fear in a speech in Houston four decades ago when he established the manned space program. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,” he said, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

OK, so today’s legislators are no JFK. In a brazen ploy, representatives in the House held a hearing recently in which witnesses spun wildly improbable scenarios of earthly doom they said would ensue if the Bush administration failed to fund asteroid-surveillance projects that just happened to be in the legislators’ districts.

One witness testified that if any one of three large meteors that “barely” missed Earth in the last few years had struck Southern California, “everyone would have died.” Another warned: “We should be running scared to go out into the solar system. We should be running fast.”

Clearly, O’Keefe and his supporters have not figured out how to appeal to our higher instincts as adeptly as Kennedy did. Still, their new vision is no less worthy of our embrace.