The U.S. gives up space

“He was the first president to recognize that for any country to be No. 1 on Earth it also must be No. 1 in space. That’s why the late President John F. Kennedy may have turned over in his grave this week as President Obama abandoned space to Russia and China,” wrote USA TODAY founder Al Neuharth on Friday.

He was referring to President Barack Obama’s 2011 budget, where just $19 billion of the $3.8 trillion budget was allocated for space. nasa’s $100 billion moon program has been abandoned.

“[A]bandoning our onetime leadership in space could become a long-term disaster,” Neuharth said.

To put the Space Age in perspective, we must understand its origin. It started Oct. 4, 1957, when the Russians (then the ussr) launched Sputnik, a non-military satellite about the size of a basketball. Sputnik orbited the Earth for 94 days and nights while we all watched it in awe and fear.At the time, we were in a “Cold War” with the ussr. Scared that we might become dead ducks if the Russians used space militarily, Congress established nasa on July 29, 1958.When JFK became president in January 1961, he gave nasa the assignment of sending men to the moon and bringing them back “in this decade.” We did, on July 20, 1969.After JFK’s tragic death, his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, kept the Apollo program a high-priority-high-budget cause. But no president since has understood its importance.So after six moon landings, we abandoned our moon program.

The Trumpet has for some years been warning that the U.S. will indeed lose superiority in space, and that this is destined to have military repercussions. But more than being concerned about the competition from Russia and China, we have warned that it is Europe that the U.S. should be most concerned about. Three years ago, ria Novosti reported that, “Reluctant to fall behind [the U.S.], Europe formulated its own strategy, almost doubling its space financing“ (emphasis ours).

Read this column by Joel Hilliker from last year for insight into what America’s declining interest in space means, and how it reflects a lack of vision and pioneering spirit—which is quickly being replaced by national complacency and addiction to debt and dependency. In that article, Joel Hilliker wrote:

As the Wall Street Journal points out, it took a mere eight years from President Kennedy’s challenge to place a man on the moon. By contrast, today, eight years from 9/11, we can’t even erect a building. Ground Zero remains a hole in the ground because construction plans, grand though they may be, are tied down with miles of Lilliputian red tape. As for America’s space program, it is withering into obsolescence. By next year it will be completely grounded, after which the U.S. hopes to pay Russia for seats aboard that nation’s trips to the International Space Station.The shift of influence from our visionary minority to its complacent majority precisely parallels America’s loss of national power.