I live less than 50 miles from Cape Canaveral, formerly Cape Kennedy, and formerly Cape Canaveral before that. Talk about an identity crisis.
And now it's going through another one: What's the mission?
This week there's a scheduled launch of an unmanned Ares rocket, which could replace the Shuttle, now on its last scheduled flights in... well, forever. NASA has submitted several mission proposals and budgets to the government, but the government's got its own budget problems. How can we send a spaceship to Mars when we can't get our own Earthship in order? Why should we go back to the moon when we've already been there? And are we content to just send astronauts up like janitors to regularly empty the Porta Potty on the Space Station?
I find these choices and questions somewhat sad.
Fifty years ago, in 1960, I was playing with my Cape Canaveral toy set as an excitable young boy growing up in Maryland and dreaming about our great big space adventures to come. Our rival superpower, the Russians, had beaten us to space with Sputnick, and now President Kennedy was promising we would beat them to the moon within 10 years.
And, by golly, we did. In the most amazing run of technological breakthroughs, NASA team dedication, personal sacrifice, and fast track government and popular support this world has ever witnessed, we went from stranded on Earth in 1960, to stepping on the moon in 1969.
But we dreamed much bigger than that.
Our favorite "prime time" television cartoon at the time was "The Jetsons", where a family like ours lived in a penthouse perched in the sky and traveled around in their own personal flying saucers. They also had a cool robot pet dog that fetched the newspaper. (Paper newspapers? In the future? Now "that's" science fiction).
Our favorite books were science fiction treats like "The Martian Chronicles" and "R is for Rocket"by Ray Bradbury, who wrote of international space travel, aliens and other worlds as if they were already here, and a natural part of our daily life experience.
We went to the movies and watched "2001: A Space Odyssey", which evo-leaped us in the single tossing of a bone from raging primates to commercial passengers on celestial spaceships waltzing through the galaxy to "The Blue Danube."
David Bowie sang about Ground Control to Major Tom in "Space Oddity", and Elton John picked up on Ray Bradbury's working stiff astronaut theme by singing as a "Rocket Man", who punched a clock and did his job five days a week, but also had time to ponder why he was, "burning out my fuse up here alone."
"Star Trek", "Space 1999", and "Star Wars" delivered us warp speed to a time where we had so distantly moved on to exploring (and fighting with) other worlds that living on Earth wasn't even an afterthought anymore.
And beyond going to the moon... none of these things happened.
And none of them likely ever will. At least the way we're headed now.
It was all just a fever dream fueled by huge leaps in rocket technology, hope, and great expectations.
My childhood imagination soared on those expectations.
And now, as an adult, I don't even want us to spend one more dime to go anywhere else in the universe. I just want us to get Earth... right. I don't want us to burn one more drop of ultra high octane rocket fuel further depleting the ozone layer and exposing the Earth to deadlier levels of radiation. I don't want us to send one more man or woman into space unless it's for some reason to "really" help us back here on Planet Earth, today. It's not enough to live on the fantasy of what travel through the universe can deliver us anymore. We've got to deliver here, first.
This isn't some tree-hugging idealist writing.
This is... merely a realist.
A realist who doesn't think we need to completely abandon our dream of space, but just abandon the last century's model and method of how we get there.
The next leap in evolution could be some matter-anti-matter dylithium crystal device breakthrough that beams us throughout the universe without burning fossil fuel or using any more precious resources, but it won't be constructed from any blueprints left behind from the existing technology paradigm. It will be another great leap of imagination that re-invents the way we meet the stars.
You see, I'm still hopeful that we will explore the space beyond, and maybe even live there one day. But the realist in me now understands we must the find the way way out by better exploring the space "within". That's where we'll find even greater answers to the questions of what's out there. That's where the bigger mysteries wait to spark our inspiration and be revealed. And that's where the next phase of space exploration can begin.
Maybe Cape Canaveral will still be the harbor for this new evolution and rename itself Cape Higher-Consciousness.
I can't wait for "that" play set.
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