One giant leap, followed by decades of baby steps

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One giant leap, followed by decades of baby steps

Tue, 09/25/2007 - 14:42 - NLN

Next week on Oct. 4, it will be 50 years since Sputnik launched the world into the so-called space age. Some space age. It has been 35 years since anybody was on the Moon, or more than 300 miles from Earth, for that matter.

NASA says it will be 2020 before astronauts get back to the Moon, meaning that it will have taken twice as long this time from presidential declaration (Bush in 2003) to actual landing than the first time around, when President John F. Kennedy declared in 1961 that America would land on the Moon within the decade, and Apollo 11 launched eight years later. You are free to make your own guesses about Mars.

If you’re not a reporter covering the space program or a scientist who uses space instruments, you probably have never met anyone who has seen the curve of the Earth with his or her own eyes. It is as if the response to Christopher Columbus’s voyage had been confined to mapping the reefs off Spain.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Read full story in The New York Times