Aiming High in '81

By Roger Rosenblatt

Like the U.S., the space shuttle Columbia is looking up as the year begins

It was mighty considerate of NASA to roll out Columbia a full three months before it shoots into the future. Everyone needs a lift in January, and here, magically, comes this stark quartet of domes and turrets rising like a restored castle out of the Florida flats. The timing is impeccable. As the Reagan Administration lumbers into place, so too this other new machine--huge, untried, ambitious (albeit with limited maneuverability); designed to aid national defense, to boost Big Business, to restore U.S. eminence in a domain once its own; a reviver of old dreams; a boon to upward mobility. The same question applies to both vehicles: Will they fly?

In Columbia's case the question is a bit needling. A monument to Murphy's Law, the great white Batmobile that will be piloted by Astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen is already two years behind its timetable and $3.6 billion over budget. Only a year ago workmen had diagnosed the ship's ailment as "smallpox," a reference to the holes left in its outer shell when heat-dissipating tiles became unglued. At one time or another, the entire project became unglued. Perhaps it was prophetic that the task force proposing the space shuttle back in 1969 was headed by Vice President Spiro Agnew. In any case, Columbia offers in its fashion a symbol not only of the Reagan Administration, but of the U.S. as it rolls into the '80s--way behind schedule, well over budget, its hopes, as ever, riding on machines.

Yet the hopes are surprisingly and justifiably high. The economy is supposed to be on its last legs, but that would be hard to prove looking across the country as the country itself looks toward the new year. In Nashville a new museum will open in June, thus completing the $40 million James K. Polk Center for the Performing Arts. The National Aquarium in Baltimore, whose projected cost is $21.5 million, is scheduled to open on July 1. Los Angeles will focus its bicentennial celebrations on creating apartments and day care centers for the poor. Chicago, Minneapolis and New York City are teeming with construction sites. Orlando's international airport will add a new $3 million terminal; Louisiana will open a $700 million offshore oil port. So go the examples, which are plentiful. Pretty heady stuff for a nation that some contend has lost its self-assurance.

In fact, that self-assurance has simply been modified. American inventiveness, once the very source of its confidence, is certainly not what it was in the days when the country came up with the safety pin or the Ford. But reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. While West Germany and Japan have sent a competitive shiver into American industries in recent years, the U.S. has still managed to produce such things as the Xerox, the transistor, the laser and the microchip. A lot of Yankeeingenuity is spent, to be sure, on diverting gadgetry, such as a projected palm-size phone and a vacuum cleaner with a memory (a seemingly gratuitous burden). But recent developments in medicine, such as the hybridoma cells for cancer treatment and the creation of insulin through genetic engineering, are making the 1980s look boldly promising.

The decline in American inventiveness that has occurred is due to several factors, including the point that companies have been more interested in short-term profits than in research. Government regulations have been too restrictive, science education too lax. But the decline is also due to the cautionary voice of citizens, a voice grown stronger in the past several years as the ramifications of what science can achieve have become clearer and more frightening. Harvard's Daniel Bell has pointed out that most of America's early inventors--Eli Whitney, Edison, the Wright brothers-- were tinkerers with tunnel vision. They could afford to be; life was not seen as a continuum in those days. Today's inventors must be true scientists, responsible to the public health as well as to the private muse. The country has grown wary of innovation, of simply doing things because they are possible. Indeed, some people will regard the good ship Columbia with squinting eyes, and long for the simplicity and ro mance of the past.

The odd thing is that Columbia does not entirely evoke the romance of the future either. The nature of its promise is mixed, since part of its immediate purpose is to sprinkle the void with whirling gizmos, including a couple of spies. Yet the other side of its promise is shimmering. Only astronauts operating from a space shuttle could create the ferris wheel depicted in 2001, could build a celestial city within and against the dark.

In short, the future rides with this vehicle. Unlike its predecessors, Columbia is not a one-shot deal. It represents the long haul, and it will be responsible for settling the territory. At the moment, the shuttle offers some thing for everyone--for the Defense Department, NASA, science, business and the nation as a whole. What uses will eventually be made of its offerings remain to be seen. The fascinating thing, after all these years, is that the prospects are as various as they are in any pioneering venture, with the same potentialities for wonder and idiocy. A machine makes no promises; only a man can do that.

When John Donne looked around the 17th century (the time when science seized the world from the church), he was dismayed that the new scientific discoveries were calling "all in doubt." These days science calls nothing in doubt but itself, since its authority is largely unchallenged. As a result, modern fears lie not so much in what is "in doubt" but rather in what there is no doubt about--the destruction of the past and the human capacity to replicate it. For all the dreams it carries, Columbia has that same capacity. Like the decade ahead of it, the vessel may be contemplated with hope or with dread, but there is no "doubt" about its ability to justify either.

That may be the best thing about it. That may be the best thing about the '80s as well. Clarity is rarely the stuff of dreams, but there is something oddly inspiring about knowing one's frailties; about recognizing who one is and where one came from; about acknowledging that your tiles can fall off, that you cost too much, and that you travel with mixed motives. No other country in the world at this time could have produced the space shuttle, and there is short-term pride to be taken in that. But pride must survive the long haul too. Soon enough the U.S. will see just how far--or if--it can rise above its present limitations.

--By Roger Rosenblatt

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.