Analysis: JFK's space legacy

President John F. Kennedy electrified the nation on May 25, 1961, when he made it America's business to get astronauts to the moon.

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safety to the Earth," Kennedy told a joint session of Congress. Because of his brilliant meld of charismatic vision, political calculation and faith in the country's rocket-builders, the goal was achieved with 165 days to spare.

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In the 40 years since, Kennedy's dream of space exploration continues, but in ways not so visible and dramatic as the moon landings.

Ever since astronaut Neil Armstrong's "one giant leap for mankind" comment, transmitted from the lunar surface on July 20, 1969, and heard by hundreds of millions of television viewers worldwide, the idea of setting foot on other worlds has seemed not only possible, but imperative.

For Americans, the Apollo program finally redeemed them from the back-to-back, knockout blows of the Soviets' Sputnik I satellite in October 1957 and cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first manned space flight in April 1961. The landings temporarily freed them from fears of sleeping under "a Communist moon," in Lyndon Johnson's words.

Brutal reality, though, overshadowed dreams of space. As the 1960s ended, and even while the Apollo program operated in full swing, Americans watched the death tolls mount in the confusing and expensive Vietnam War. They worried about their sense of economic well being during the recessions of the 1970s, and they struggled with social upheavals in both decades that tested the limits of law and common sense. In the face of all that, thinking about traveling to the stars seemed too indulgent and distant.

So space exploration efforts took a different tack. For nearly 30 years, the U.S. space program has focused on unmanned planetary missions and the development of the reusable space shuttle fleet and the International Space Station. Though the interplanetary efforts have generated some spectacular successes, the shuttle and space station have provided relatively modest accomplishments, punctuated by two tragedies -- the explosion of Challenger in January 1986 and the disintegration of Columbia last February.

After the Columbia catastrophe, the shuttles' return to flight will not be quick. Key congressional leaders want to halt NASA's plans to build a new type of spaceship. Rocket manufacturers are pushing for a return to disposable boosters. Privately developed, reusable suborbital vehicles are expected to debut next year.

"I can't predict how this is going to turn out," said Robert Zubrin, of Boulder, Colo., author of "On to Mars: Colonizing a New World."

There is a debate going on right now, he said, "whether we go anywhere in space ... or whether the space program continues to stagnate until it eventually implodes under its own weight."

Zubrin said he thinks a Mars mission is possible under NASA's current spending plan, but it would require the space shuttle program's $4 billion annual operating budget.

"We got screwed up by ignoring the Apollo mode," he said. "We design hardware, we build things, and then we argue that they are going to be useful in the future. There is no metric for achievement because there is no goal."

Zubrin also said the space agency has a very different, far more complacent managerial culture than the one that enabled it to pull off so many manned space miracle missions in the '60s and early '70s. In the Apollo era, failure was not an option, he said.

"In the current NASA, failure is no problem. You can cancel programs after spending billions and producing nothing because it's never doing anything. It's just something to keep them busy for a while," he said.

Yet it was Kennedy's dramatic rhetoric and clear-cut goal that energized NASA and rallied the American people behind it in the 1960s. Duke University historian Alex Roland notes even if a manned mission to Mars was approved, going there without the ability to sustain colonies would end up just as empty as the abandoned moon program.

"Apollo made sense because it was a political program. It was self-consciously a demonstration that the western free market, capitalist system was superior to a controlled, closed, Communist style of government," Roland said. "After Apollo, NASA played its cards wrong. The moon mission was a distraction from the logically ordered development path they may have chosen, but it did give them enormous resources and public goodwill."

NASA had the opportunity to refashion Apollo into a long-term program, he added, "but instead they spent all their time trying to recreate Apollo. They failed to see that Apollo was an artifact of the Cold War and the country wasn't going to do that again."

Though America's future path to space remains doubtful and obscure, few would doubt Kennedy's decision to use the space program to play out a foreign policy drama stands among his most important legacies.

"Those words from Kennedy ... ring down in history and it's going to ring down in history when people don't even remember who Eisenhower and Johnson are," Zubrin said. "Only one queen of Spain -- Isabella -- got to open a new world. Kennedy won himself immortality by setting us on the path to toward the moon."

UPI aerospace correspondent Irene Mona Klotz has been covering the space program for 17 years. E-mail sciencemail@upi.com