40 Years of Studying Nausea During Weightlessness

That's pretty much how Charles Krauthammer describes the state of the space program since the end of Apollo:

Michael Crichton once wrote that if you had told a physicist in 1899 that within a hundred years humankind would, among other wonders (nukes, commercial airlines), "travel to the moon, and then lose interest ... the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad." In 2000, I quoted these lines expressing Crichton's incredulity at America's abandonment of the moon. It is now 2009, and the moon recedes ever farther.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. We say we will return in 2020. But that promise was made by a previous president, and this president has defined himself as the anti-matter to George Bush. Moreover, for all Barack Obama's Kennedyesque qualities, he has expressed none of John Kennedy's enthusiasm for human space exploration.

So with the Apollo moon program long gone, and with Constellation, its supposed successor, still little more than a hope, we remain in retreat from space. Astonishing. After countless millennia of gazing and dreaming, we finally got off the ground at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Within 66 years, a nanosecond in human history, we'd landed on the moon. Then five more landings, 10 more moonwalkers and, in the decades since, nothing.

To be more precise: almost 40 years spent in low Earth orbit studying, well, zero-G nausea and sundry cosmic mysteries. We've done it with the most beautiful, intricate, complicated -- and ultimately, hopelessly impractical -- machine ever built by man: the space shuttle. We turned this magnificent bird into a truck for hauling goods and people to a tinkertoy we call the International Space Station, itself created in a fit of post-Cold War internationalist absentmindedness as a place where people of differing nationality can sing "Kumbaya" while weightless.

The shuttle is now too dangerous, too fragile and too expensive. Seven more flights and then it is retired, going -- like the Spruce Goose and the Concorde -- into the museum of Things Too Beautiful And Complicated To Survive.

America's manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the U.S. will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon, but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We'll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.

There's more here.

I can still remember the excitement of watching countdowns as of kid during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. Every flight was a new discovery and fraught with all sorts of perils real and imagined.

I watched the Shuttle launch the other afternoon and there was none of that excitement about what was going on. Oh, they're just running some more stuff up to the space station. High tech delivery boys. Nice pictures and all, but if there's any excitement left in these missions it's in wondering if the thing will come back safely.

America needs a challenge like we had in the 60's, but I doubt that as a society we're up to it anymore. Too much need for immediate gratification and too much risk aversion. And with a president hell bent on socializing the country, innovation and entrepreneurship are no longer welcome. Until we "solve health care" and "stop global warming" there won't be room in the budget for fantastic voyages outside our own low earth orbit.

And with the retirement of the Shuttle, we won't even be able to do that.