Nasa: Space Concierge

By Charles Krauthammer

Perhaps now the astronomers and other "pure" scientists will stop whining about how manned space flight is stealing all the money from real science. Why? Because last week man -- that clunky, bulky, heaving, breathing space lunk -- saved Hubble. And Hubble, the $1.6 billion orbiting telescope, is the kind of robot observer that scientists like to claim is the real way to explore space, far better than the clumsy Spam-in-a-can bipeds we periodically and extravagantly hurl into orbit. Well, now that man has done this for the robots, it is time for the robots and their human advocates to shut up, for at least a week or two, about the waste and expense of manned space exploration.

The Endeavour shuttle astronauts performed the most complicated space repair ever attempted. And doing so, they proved at last that man (meaning men and women, of course; please don't write) can do real work in space, and do it efficiently. They not only saved Hubble. They saved NASA, which with failures stretching back to Challenger has rapidly been losing public favor and political support. Just as it was coming to be seen as yet another wasteful government bureaucracy, NASA does the Hubble rescue and shows that man in space can be useful.

This, of course, is the rationale for NASA's next great project, the space station, a place where wonderful new chemicals, cures and gizmos yet undreamed of are to be produced. And for those still justifiably skeptical about these claims, the Hubble repair provides yet another role for man in space: concierge. Who, after all, will service our huge earth-serving space infrastructure, the satellites that bring us Beavis and Butt-head, that allow weathermen to guess wildly a full seven days into the future, that can rattle the pocket pagers of every Rogaine salesman in the country? Who will service these vital underpinnings of Western civilization? Man, says NASA.

It is something of a pity that appliance repair is the way to justify man in space these days. Thirty years ago, when all this was starting, the model for manned flight was not Art Carney in the sewer but Vasco da Gama rounding the Cape. Long ago, public support for space exploration had two parts. First, a spirit of competition. It was sport -- war by other means -- writ large, very large: an international race to the moon, by God.

But it was more than sport. It was romance. It meant meeting our destiny. Today it means little more than physical displacement. Compare the films of the early space age with the sci-fi of today. Compare 2001 with Robocop, Close Encounters with The Terminator. Compare John Kennedy's thrilling pledge to race to the moon with . . . what? No politician talks that way anymore. The new frontier is not the moon. It's HMOs.

Today no one would give Kennedy's speech, and, if given, no one would believe it. It is 30 years later, and we are weighed down by cynicism about government, worries about our economy, deep anxieties about a level of social breakdown we could not have imagined in 1961. True, in the '60s too we had our scolds who told us that money spent on the moon was better spent on this or that program here on Earth. But in a more expansive time, people ignored those with the souls of accountants who knew nothing of national adventure.

Today those who believe that government's role is not bankrolling wonder but fixing bridges are in the majority. There is no constituency for romance.

Perhaps this is the way of all exploration. In rosy retrospect, we tend to see the great 15th and 16th century Spanish and Portuguese explorers as seekers of destiny. They were not. Generally they were seekers of a quick way to the riches of Asia. They were after gold and silk -- gathering slaves and manufacturing Christians along the way -- not romance. Certainly not romance for its own sake. Perhaps we should not be too dismayed to find ourselves 500 years later pushing the envelope for the same reasons, mundane but politically viable, of commerce and convenience.

Still, it is hard to understand how this can be. It is hard to understand how people can live in this age and not thrill to the idea of manned exploration. What, after all, will the 20th century be remembered for? Its music, its philosophy, its art pale in comparison with that of centuries past. The 20th century will be remembered for three things: its perfection of genocide, its discovery of nuclear terror, and its invention of flight. We will be remembered as the people who went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years.

And spent the next 25 on maintenance. Yes, we need the shuttle. We need the space station. We need to fix satellites and measure ozone or whatever. But we also need to roam. It is time to return to the moon. And then on to Mars. Why? Might as well ask why Sir Richard Burton searched for the source of the Nile.

The Hubble mission was a great success. But sometime soon, some spacewalking astronaut is going to crash into some billion-dollar mirror, and the cry will go up again: Why the clunky, bulky bipeds? Why not robots?

Because robots can fix, but they cannot dream. Upon rounding the moon and apprehending the earth, they are not moved to recite Genesis. It may be politically shrewd, but it is perilous to sell manned exploration on grounds of efficiency alone. In the end, man is clunky. But he sings.