Will The New Mars Rover Save The U.S. Space Program?

14 January 2013

Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon years before I was born. It was, at the time, the most extraordinary thing that many Americans had ever witnessed, broadcast on live TV in July 1969. The moment was infamously described by Armstrong as “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” (you can listen to the original transmission here).

More than 43 years later, the arrival of the Curiosity Rover on Mars was greeted with much the same kind of enthusiasm. The landing was tweeted, perhaps more than talked about, very nearly live with a new generation; of course, there was something of a delay since signals and satellite images had to make the 154 million trip miles from Mars and that takes a little bit of time. Hundreds of thousands of folks followed Curiosity on twitter @marscuriosity and on Facebook (yes, the Curiosity has its own fan page) for the latest news, pictures and commentary of the most exciting space mission in years.

In case you haven’t been following Curiosity (there is that whole other exciting thing happening in the UK), the Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Mars Science Laboratory mission landed a large, mobile laboratory called, appropriately, Curiosity, on Mars this week. It’s been a long time in the making: the spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on November 26, 2011. It was designed to steer itself to the Red Planet before touching down – which it did successfully without crashing (whew). The cost of the project? $2.5 billion. You can read the specs in detail straight from NASA (downloads as a pdf).

Curiosity will explore the Red Planet for about the next two years. The hope is that the rover can figure out something that scientists have been talking about forever: whether there is life on Mars.

I know what you’re thinking: you didn’t even think we had a space program anymore. A lot of people didn’t. You see, NASA used to be all the rage. It was established under President Eisenhower in 1958 (gobbling up a similar agency), just about ten years before we first landed on the moon. When it started, the agency consisted of approximately 8,000 employees and had an annual budget of $100 million.

By the 1960s, space was officially cool. We were sending up missions to space – and to the moon – faster and better than the Soviets, which, let’s face it, was our primary competition. By the 1970s, moonwalks were routine and our astronauts were bringing back moon rocks like they were souvenirs from Crystal Cave. We even built a space station (remember Skylab?). Funding wasn’t really an issue: we were prepared as a country to do whatever it took to go faster and farther than ever before.

In the 1980s, Reagan had his own Apollo moment when during the 1984 State of the Union address, he announced plans to collaborate with the Soviets on an international space station, saying: