The Ming Report

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

January 9, 2004 - Those electronic photos beamed back from the Martian surface are fascinating and the Spirit’s mission is just beginning. We can look forward to more fascinating images and data to follow as the rover leaves its nest and rolls across the landscape we see spread out before us. The successful landing of the robot investigation instills a great degree of non-partisan pride and engenders a feeling that we would each like to be there, to pick up that rock in the lower left hand corner of the panoramic photo and look at what seems to be a perfect rectangle carved in its surface. What a perfect time to announce a renewed intention to breathe life into a moribund manned space program.

President George H. W. Bush thought that the 20th anniversary of man's first visit to the moon was that “perfect time”. To mark the occasion in 1989 he said, “Back to the moon; back to the future; and this time, back to stay. And then a journey to tomorrow, a journey to another planet: a manned mission to Mars.”

Congress thought the President’s 10 year plan was too expensive at $500 Billion and said no.

According to Whitehouse spokesman Scott McClellan President George W. Bush is poised to renew his father’s unfinished vision and announce a program to establish a permanent manned base on the moon as a stepping stone for a Mars expedition. This time the cost is estimated to have swelled to at least $1 Trillion. In the aftermath of the Columbia disaster the current President Bush ordered a comprehensive review of the NASA manned space program led by Vice-President Cheney. The Lunar base project grew out of Cheney’s report that urged the President to not only maintain the manned spaceflight program but to push it further than it had ever gone before.

There is a lure to space exploration that transcends the quest for knowledge and the advancement of science. “To boldly go where no man has gone before” has pulled at us since Gene Rodenberry’s creation was first broadcast. Captain Kirk has gone from a trim spaceship commander to an bloated old man hawking cut-rate airline tickets. Still the exploration of space has an appeal that transcends the reality of an American economy that the IMF calls a “global time-bomb”.

The President seems intent on finishing one more thing that his father left unfinished no matter what the cost. The conquest of Iraq is not yet completed and the cost of that unfinished business cannot yet be totted up. Can it be time to renew yet another unfinished project at the cost of borrowing another Trillion Dollars to do it?

Is it only a coincidence that the Chinese just inaugurated its own manned spaceflight program with the Moon as its next objective? Will the President hold up the specter of a Chinese military lunar base armed with Weapons of Mass Destruction as a justification for occupying the moon?

Is this new enthusiasm for the exploration of space an expression and recognition of the adventurous human spirit or is it a manifestation of a yet more basic and less praiseworthy human emotion? Is this just a part of a son’s drive to surpass his father’s accomplishments? Is it just part of a campaign to achieve that which eluded his father – a Bush Second Term? The first clue will be when President Bush tells us just how he proposes to pay for it.