Space exploration always has taxed the limits of human imagination. In 1957 when the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first-ever man-made satellite, it sent a chill through many Americans. And yet few of them could articulate why.
Military experts were called upon to offer their assessments. They called it a useless invention because satellites couldn't drop bombs on people.
Today, with the hindsight of 54 years, we can see the more than 1,650 spin-off technologies from space exploration. We understand its benefits on medical care in the form of digital image processing, monitoring systems and other equipment. We understand how satellites do everything from allow cell phones to transmit video instantly to help recreational joggers track distance and speed through GPS watches. We understand both the military and civilian uses for satellite images as rendered through programs such as Google Earth. We take satellite television for granted, expecting to watch breaking news from faraway lands instantly, and we gasp at the clear images of distant galaxies obtained through the Hubble Telescope.
Our wish is that this sense of hope for things as-yet not imagined did not die with the final landing of the Space Shuttle Atlantis on Thursday. The landing marked the formal end to the shuttle program, which for 30 years has conducted experiments, helped build a space station and enhanced cooperation with space programs in Russia and other nations. It should not, however, mark the end to U.S. space exploration.
There is reason for that hope, although we wish those reasons were better defined. The private sector now will be responsible for building craft capable of shuttling astronauts and others back and forth to a space station. If they were wise, these private firms would hire liberally from the many experts who have been laid off from NASA. If there is a profit motive, the private sector surely will come through, and perhaps in ways today's experts, much as their predecessors in 1957, cannot think broadly enough to imagine. And if a privately funded space program succeeds, it could enhance the traditional U.S. leadership role in space without taking resources from a financially troubled federal government.
Whether it can push space exploration to new levels — say, to Mars and beyond — remains a bit harder to imagine.
In the meantime, the United States will have to hitch rides from the Russians to the space station. That irony was not lost on Moscow, whose space agency released a statement saying "...the era of the Soyuz has started in manned space flight." The veiled implication was that the Russians, after all, had won the space race.
That race, however, is far from over, nor has it lost its importance to national security. This may not be the time to champion expensive public-funded explorations of the cosmos, but it is a time for American ingenuity to pick up the torch of space travel and experimentation in whatever way possible.
We can't precisely articulate why. Space travel is too full of surprises for that. But Americans no longer can afford to be as narrow as those military experts in 1957.