[From the diaries -- Hunter]
I remember the first Moon landing in 1969. I was 10 years old at the time, living with my family in an old trailer park in Boulder, Colorado. Everyone in the country was glued to the TV when Neil Armstrong stepped out of the Eagle and said those famous words "One small step for man, One giant leap for mankind".
I guess he was wrong.
It was about 8 years prior to that, in 1962, when President Kennedy gave that famous speech about putting a man on the moon. In the years that followed, many Americans dreamed about going "boldly where no man has gone before". Star Trek came out in 1966, followed by Lost in Space, 2001 A Space Odyssey, and hundreds of other books and movies about traveling in the universe. Those were also the days of Vietnam and the Cold War with the "evil Soviet Union", where many people thought we were all going to die in some terrible nuclear war. It's interesting - I remember the Rapture people preaching about the "End Times" back then, just like they do now. But most of us thought, that if we could just make it past that - the Cold War - and if we could manage to make it into the 21st Century, everything would be so much better. We would be taking vacations on the Moon!
I guess we were wrong
Now most people are saying that we should make big cuts in NASA's budget. Many say that the Space Station is a frivolous waste of money; after all, there are more important things to spend money on now; people are homeless and starving, New Orleans needs to be re-built, roads need to be fixed, the country needs to be made safe from terrorists, the Middle East needs to be democratized etc. etc. The scientists who work for NASA can certainly find new jobs; surely DOD (which seems to have an unlimited budget) can hire these scientists and engineers for the SDI program, or to build better and more efficient weapons - you know, those bunker busters and neutron bombs and laser weapons and who-knows-what other secret weapons they are developing. This is obviously much more important than studying some stupid star a zillion light-years away.
I guess they are right.
It is true that most of NASA's programs don't benefit people right now. It may take years to develop a program, and then decades before most people will see any tangible results in their day-to-day lives. NASA is also having some of the same problems with cost overruns by the Industrial-Complex contractors that the rest of the government is having. According to many Americans, NASA's money would be much better spent fixing the problems in our world today, and not in paying for some science-fiction programs which will only benefit future generations not even born yet.
I guess you're right
As far as Future Generations are concerned - forget them. They will be too busy with more important things, like paying off our deficit and working hard so that our generation can retire comfortably. Their scientists won't have time to think about Space Exploration - they will be busy developing new sources of energy since we will have used up all the fossil fuel, and they'll be needing to clean up all the toxic wastes and environmental damage we've left behind for them. And who knows what the effects Global Warming will have on the future. If the seas rise, as many scientists predict, world cities that are built near sea level (like New Orleans) will have to be moved to higher ground. They'll be too busy to worry about what happened to NASA.
So let them watch the videos of Neil Armstrong stepping on the Moon, or the old episodes of Star Trek. That's a good enough Space Program to leave them with...