Last week, the final mission of space shuttle program completed with the safe touchdown of Atlantis in Florida. With this landing, the American manned space program came to an official, ignominious end. This bitter defeat comes not from a foreign enemy, or from a technological failure--but from the conscious, deliberative, mistaken choice by America to withdraw from space.
Historians regard with bewilderment at the 1433 decision by China to destroy the immense treasure ships of Cheng Ho, and to abandon its flourishing trading routes throughout the Indian Ocean. The size and scale of Cheng Ho’s expeditions is best grasped by the fact that nearly a century later, when the European explorers of Magellan’s voyage first entered this region of the world, many of the locals still prized artifacts, such as fine porcelain, acquired by trading with Cheng Ho’s fleet. Despite the potential of this empire building, one day in 1433 China inexplicably chose to discard its budding empire and withdraw from the world for over five hundred years.
Historians may look upon the end of the space shuttle program, 21 July 2011, as a similar day for the United States.
Generations of Americans have taken for granted the possibility that our best and brightest might one day achieve the dream of becoming an astronaut. Now we no longer have a manned spaceflight program, though it is possible Americans may still travel to the ISS--as passengers on Russian craft. The unearthing of irony is one of the prime motivators for historians, yet this irony is so hyperbolic as to strain credulity.
Astronaut Story Musgrave put it this way:
“Why are we so poor in our vision and so poor in our project management that we come to a point where it's reasonable to phase out the current program and we have no idea what the next one is? … Washington is in total failure that this has happened.”
Just as America has decided to abandon the frontier of space, American science stands at a precipice. American students are fleeing from science; enrollments in scientific disciplines hover in the lower single digits, while more lucrative fields--business administration, accounting, finance--swell with students. But the problems of American education are not restricted to science education.
Americans are spurning higher education, though advanced training has never been more vital to high-paying employment. The United States used to be first among other nations in the percentage of 25-34 year-olds who had earned college degrees; now we are number twelve, behind Belgium and Russia. One-third of universities saw graduation rates fall in the years between 2002 and 2008. Instead of helping this problem by lowering college costs, we are choosing instead to make it more difficult and expensive to attend college; in 2009, the University of California, one of the largest public university systems in the world, decided to raise tuition 32% in one year, making even a public education unaffordable even for many students born in the lower middle classes.
We like to imagine that America is first in every field, but in science the real figure is number twenty-nine; American students rank 29th in science abilities, behind Croatia and the Czech Republic.
Even as we are choosing to fail, other countries are choosing to thrive. The People’s Republic of China is rapidly gaining ground in the number of peer-reviewed scientific papers published English; it is estimated that by 2013, the PRC will publish more scientific papers than America.
Yet this crisis elicits not even a dim reflection of the panic that consumed the country after the Sputnik launch. There are no calls for massive funding for education, no calls for increasing the number of federally-funded scientific research positions, no call for augmenting the number of science professorships at universities so that some of the PhDs snared in perpetual post-doc hell can finally begin their full research careers instead of spending all their time bumping from one temporary job to another. Such fixes are not even remotely part of the discussion.
Instead, on the same day that Atlantis touched down in Florida, the Republican leader of the House of Representatives informed the president that he was ending negotiations over the increase of the federal debt limit, a once-trivial formality needed to maintain the full faith and credit of the United States. Instead of addressing the problems of science, political leaders are consumed with petty games of chicken. Just as during the invasion of Iraq, Americans workers setting up the occupation infrastructure were forced to follow OSHA regulations in the middle of an active war zone, our entire government now seems paralyzed with meaningless theatre while an ominous threat looms. It is as if the captain of the Titanic ordered his officers to make sure their compasses were in calibration even as the ship sank.
Manned spaceflight is not the only scientific casualty of these misplaced priorities. In April, an important radio telescope array in California was forced to shutter its operations for lack of funds . For scientific discoveries in astronomy, or paleontology, or high energy physics, one must increasingly look outside the United States. We have decided to withdraw.
Who would have thought that as scientific research blossom elsewhere--in the PRC, at CERN--the United States would be pulling back? Who would have thought that a little over a half century following Sputnik, the Russians would have finally fulfilled Khrushchev’s taunt and buried the United States?
But then, during the height of the treasure fleet, how could Cheng Ho have known that the forces of irrationality and incorrect decisions would so easily overwhelm progress?
