NASA Overshoots

Back in the early days of the nation's space program, I was a reporter and admitted supporter.

It was a heady time at Cape Canaveral when Alan Shepard made that first suborbital flight and then John Glenn circled the planet a little later.

Those events were topped by the historic words from Neil Armstrong as he put a foot on the moon, and we all cheered with the workers at what is now the Johnson Space Center.

But the space program has had more than its share of problems since then. The latest, of course, is the embarrassing charge of attempted murder against Capt. Lisa Nowak, an experienced astronaut. The psychological testing of these fliers has some obvious holes.

However, the case against Nowak is a small misadventure compared with the other problems at NASA, financial as well as human.

There have been three tragic accidents with the loss of lives of entire crews–Apollo far back in 1967, Discovery in 1986, and Challenger in 2003. Seventeen have died. The astronauts, past and present, are fully aware of the risks involved. It does not make those deaths any easier to accept.

On the money side, the president's budget for NASA in the next fiscal year is $17.3 billion. It is too much for a nation fighting Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while calling for cutbacks in other important domestic programs.

The space planners would even like to reach Mars at some distant date. Why? Haven't we learned about the tangential benefits to mankind in our trips to the moon?

Space enthusiasts will accuse me and others questioning the cost and danger of NASA's big plans of being reactionary. I call it realistic.

The space race is a distant event of the past. Our nation was caught by surprise when the Soviets launched Sputnik. We caught them and went ahead.

The likelihood of any nation using space as a weapon of war against the United States is almost nonexistent since any attack would produce an immediate retaliatory response from us.

Stay in space in a limited way, and cut back on the money.