If space is as the motto of Star Trek repeatedly reminds us the final frontier, then it is our fervent hope that the word final never be applied to the idea of space exploration itself.
This is so even though last week saw the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis on what is to be that spacecrafts last foray into space and the third-to-last shuttle mission to be launched.
We do not claim the technological expertise to debate the wisdom of NASAs plan to terminate the space shuttle program after the current Atlantis mission and the final launches of Discovery in September and Endeavour in November.
There are, NASA says, serious cost and safety issues with the shuttles that have led to the decision to replace them with new and improved launch vehicles.
As to the cost issue, we are inclined not to argue. Each shuttle launch is estimated to cost some $450 million, according to NASA itself, which certainly seems a hefty price-tag.
As to safety, few if any Americans need reminders, not after Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003.
Even Atlantis current mission has been plagued with technological glitches, including the failure (we hope temporary) of systems to check whether the shuttles heat-shielding tiles were damaged during launch.
There are far more ponderous considerations hovering over the current space program than the end of the shuttle era, of course. Chief among them are serious and sometimes acrimonious debates over the future direction in which Americas space program should head in the coming decades.
Last month, President Obama jumped right into the contentious heart of that debate. While pledging that he is 100% committed to the mission of NASA and its future, the president also redefined that mission in the most revolutionary way since President John F. Kennedys famous pledge to reach the moon before the 1960s were over.
Obamas plan calls not only for radically new approaches to launch and propulsion technologies, but for strikingly new objectives favoring deeper space exploration over orbital missions, working to develop technologies to allow humans to work and remain in space for longer periods of time and scrapping the Constellation moon mission in favor of attempts to send a manned mission to Mars by the mid-2030s.
These are dramatic and substantial changes and we applaud them, just so long as they arent as some critics of the plan are alleging mere covers for what really amounts to the administrations indifference to space exploration and its extreme discomfort with the stellar cost of such exploration (pun fully intended).
We can certainly understand cost considerations, especially in the troubled economic doldrums in which we currently find ourselves, but there are compelling reasons why the US should not turn its back on the stars, even if the costs seem painful and at the moment hard to justify.
On the most basic level, there are the practical benefits brought about by space exploration. Throughout the 20th century, it became increasingly obvious that the two best and most effective ways to advance technological knowledge and application came either through space exploration or war.
Is the exploration of space not an infinitely better way to keep ourselves on the technological cutting edge than the pursuit of deadly conflict?
On a more profound level, the exploration of space strikes us as an inherently natural expression of a very basic and probably crucial dimension of the human spirit. The empirical evidence strongly suggests that we are curious and restless creatures, always seeking to know what lies on the other side of the hill, the river, the ocean the universe.
From the first pre-humans who set out from wherever they were to the great maritime explorers of the Renaissance to the pioneers of the American West to the astronauts and cosmonauts of today, human beings have always sought to explore that which lies beyond.
In the process, the human race has grown in confidence and knowledge, has expanded its awareness of its environment, has become more integrally and essentially human. Exploration has, in myriad ways, made us who and what we are.
Yes, we should boldly go where no man has gone before as man has always done. But over and above our restlessness and curiosity, let us remain humbly aware of the great vastness that surrounds us and our relative place within it.
As the Book of Psalms so beautifully tells us, When I look at Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have established; What is man, that You are mindful of him?
