America is lost in space

Here's a story posted on Yahoo! News the other day about how Russia believes it has pulled ahead in the race to Mars.

What race?

Americans don't think we're in a race for Mars. Instead we're obsessed with whether Dr. Phil should or should not do a show about Britney Spears... or whether the Patriots will or will not succeed in their quest for an undefeated season... or whether Roger Clemens did or did not use steroids.... We are navel gazers now, not star gazers. Unless the 'star' is Tom Hanks. For Americans, a 'binary star' is Brangelina... or Tomkat.

I know I've used this line before, but I wonder if there was a similar mood in Portugal in the decades after Prince Henry the Navigator -- and I don't refer to an obsession with 'celebrity' or trivia, but rather to a belief that we must look inward, and solve our own problems at home, before resuming our outward drive. Portugal never resumed.

America is a frontier nation: Expansion is hard-wired into our character. Would you rather see our restless, questing youth carving out new cities on the Moon or Mars... or dodging bullets and bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan? There are those in America who are prisoners of the expansionist urge, but do not have the vision of outer space. I believe they're called "neocons."

And what if Earth really is on the cusp of a dramatic climate shift? Even if Al Gore's all wrong about human contributions to global warming, the Earth has experienced dramatic climate changes in its history. And there have been cataclysmic extinction events in Earth's past as well. We're just learning about 'supervolcanos' -- catastrophic eruptions, like those of the Yellowstone caldera, volcanos so huge that we puny, short-lived, newcomer humans didn't even recognize them for what they were. And then there are meteorites, like the one which finished off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. (The latest research suggests that dinosaurs were already in decline -- being unable to cope with climate change.) The survival of our species may depend on scattering our genes across the Solar System... and eventually the Galaxy.

Unfortunately, we can't just expect private industry to take over and put us into space to stay: Rockets must fly through airspace -- government regulated -- and over cities and rivers and towns and lakes and streams. There are pollution regulations to consider, and safety regulations, too. (What goes up might come down on an undesigned trajectory....) No, any private Enterprise (oh, there's a pun) would still be subject to serious government oversight. For the present, therefore, we must rely on the national government to take us to these new heights.

But governments -- I think all governments, not just ours -- are poor innovators. Meanwhile, in other news, India's Tata Motors has unveiled its new ultra-cheap Tata Nano. It turned out not to be the miracle compressed air car from Tata that I wrote about last May... but it may be India's Model T.

One senses that India may be a country on the rise... that the baton of innovation may have passed from America to South Asia.

I submit, in fact, that these stories are related.

India seems to have a national vision, a goal, a dream to modernize and take its place among the great nations of the world. America plods on, without vision, without consensus, without a great goal behind which we can unify and move outward.

I just finished reading Stephen Baxter's 12-year old novel, "Voyage" -- about a trip to Mars that never happened. Baxter's a pessimist among pessimists: I think we can do much more and much better than he was willing to envision. But even he recognized that a Mars trip was important, worthwhile and achievable.

I write that America is lost in space fully aware of the Space Shuttle and the ISS -- the Space Truck and the Space Truck Stop. We have a Chicago-area astronaut on board ISS right now -- Dan Tani -- marooned, temporarily, because of the latest delays in the launch of Shuttle Atlantis. Tani briefly percolated into American consciousness because his mother was killed last month in a railroad crossing accident... and, of course, Tani couldn't get home for the funeral.

The Shuttle is about to be retired; it should have been retired long ago. But there's no replacement ready to go. There's no apparent broad-based support in this country for continued exploration -- and exploitation -- of outer space. Am I the only one who sees this as a tragedy?