Dan Rather GOING ON four months from the day that the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry, the search for debris is winding down. Columbia's data recorder has been found, along with several of the experiments that were being conducted onboard the shuttle, including one that researchers hoped might lead to a way to improve cancer treatments.
What might never be recovered, however, is confidence in the space shuttle as the centrepiece of the United States space programme. What is still missing is a viable way forward for NASA. And what is gradually coming to light is a full understanding of just how far the space agency and our vision for the future of space travel have fallen to Earth since the heady days of the Mercury, Apollo and even Skylab programmes.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, space and the future were virtually synonymous. Manned orbital flights and launches to the moon and unmanned probes to points far beyond spurred national pride and kindled a generation of schoolchildren's interest in science. These collateral benefits of space exploration have been invoked so many times that they now might seem the stuff of carefully crafted legend, but your reporter saw them firsthand, in his own children in an often-divided country that could find common ground while looking to the heavens.
SPACE PROGRAMME
While the civilian benefits in products and applications - of the space programme might have been overstated through the years, space flight stood undeniably at the cutting edge of science and, more generally, human endeavour. To venture past the Earth and its atmosphere, to explore other worlds this had been the stuff of dreams since the dawn of civilisation, and it is impossible to overstate the feelings of inspiration and awe that accompanied seeing them come to fruition in one's lifetime.
Now, as the shuttle programme comes under increased scrutiny in the wake of the Columbia disaster, we are learning that the three operating shuttles that remain rely increasingly on obsolete technology. Florida's Kennedy Space Centre, home to the shuttle and the space programme since the early days, suffers in a sad sate of disrepair. Engineers at NASA have been reduced to trolling eBay and other precincts of the Internet for computer equipment and other parts that have not been manufactured in years, some by companies that no longer exist. In ordinary homes and offices, 5-inch floppy disks are a relic. To today's kids, they are if recognised at all part of the detritus of a past that includes LP records and rotary phones. At NASA, once home to the future, they are still very much a part of the present.
GREATEST GLORY
How did we come to this sorry pass? Some see the seeds of decay as having been sown in 1969, the year of the first moon landing and NASA's greatest glory. That's when Congress balked at funding both a space station and the means to get there, and when NASA decided to settle on building just the means to get there the space shuttle fleet.
With a space station finally in orbit, the shuttle is being asked to continue until at least 2012. Until it flies again, astronauts must depend on the Russian Soyuz craft to get them to and from the International Space Station which in itself represents an indignity that is difficult to convey to those who were not around for the days of the space race.
Nine years is a long time for a shop-worn fleet already mired in the past. And it's long time to wait for a future that, in an age of changed national priorities, seems to have long ago passed NASA by.
Dan Rather is a television news anchor. Copyright 2003 DJR Inc. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
