Progress

It's thirty years ago today that a man last walked on the surface of the Moon. Harrison Schmitt, the only scientist ever to go to the moon, and Gene Cernan, the mission commander of Apollo 17, left the lunar surface on 14 December, 1972.

I'm reminded of something that I once read, a quote from one of the Apollo astronauts. He said that it had taken 60 years to get from the Wright Brothers to Neil Armstrong -- from the very first tentative manned flight, to the journey to another celestial body. How would people in 1969 react if they found out that by the year 2002, after more than 30 years, the field of manned spaceflight would have made only the slightest progress?

There's an inarguable scientific value as well as an economy in sending probes and robots to other worlds, and it is a form of exploration, but it's hardly the frontier stuff that makes the heart pound and the mind soar with tales of human bravery and ingenuity in unfamiliar places. We need to follow our early remote investigations with manned missions to other worlds. We know beyond doubt that we can reach the Moon again if we try, and there is no shortage of realistic plans to send humans to Mars.

Manned spaceflight shouldn't be about deploying satellites and fixing the Hubble Telescope for the nth time. That's like driving a car around the driveway but never taking it out on the road. There are only so many things people can do in low Earth orbit and it seems we're running out. But the list of things we could do elsewhere is huge.

Where's the spirit of space exploration that was so tangible in the 1960s? When is humankind going to go back into space? I hope I see it in my lifetime.