By Travis Walters
On Sept. 12, 1962, President John Kennedy spoke at Rice Stadium in Texas on our nation’s impending adventure into outer space.
“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people,” said Kennedy. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
Indeed we did do the other things. We sent machines to Mars and found the very water of this new sea. The Soviet Union sent probes to Mars, but they failed within seconds of deploying. The United States was the first to land a machine on the surface of Mars that sent images back to Earth. Then we went again, and again. We sent machines to roam the barren landscape and dig into the soil to tell us what it was made of and what was underneath it. One such trip took the rovers Spirit and Opportunity to the planet. They were supposed to last 3 months, and now four and a half years later we find out that funding for their mission may be extended to 2009 because of their continued survival. The last mission by the Phoenix Lander dug beneath the soil and discovered ice, and possibly perchlorate. The chemical perchlorate is most often used as an oxidizer in rocket fuel. More analysis is being done by the universities involved to determine the validity of the finding.
“Yet the vows of this nation can only be fulfilled if we in this nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation,” said Kennedy. Yet our leadership wanes at this hour. The space agencies of China, India, Japan and the European Union are all building toward an expanded space presence. China in the past few years joined with the United States and Russia in launching a human into space and returning it to Earth.
NASA has new ambitious goals for the future, however. By the year 2020 they plan to have humans on the Moon exploring and setting up outposts for a permanent human presence. And in the decades following, humankind will cast aside the autonomous robots and travel in person, across this new sea, to step foot on another planet for the first time. Kennedy concluded his speech by saying, “Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, ‘Because it is there.’ Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there.”
