The Space Barons by Christian Davenport

Author:Christian Davenport
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2018-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

IN 2008, NASA was building a big rocket, too. A pair, actually—the Ares I, which would fly to low Earth orbit, and the Ares V, which was destined for the moon and then Mars. Along with the Orion spacecraft, their names, taken from Greek and Roman mythology, matched the lofty aims of what was then a White House program called Constellation.

They were part of President George W. Bush’s plan—called the Vision for Space Exploration—for the nation to return to the moon. In a speech at NASA headquarters attended by Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the lunar surface, the president recited what Cernan had said as he departed the moon, promising that “we shall return.” In his speech, Bush promised that “America will make those words come true.”

But in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president, his NASA transition team led by Lori Garver, a space agency veteran who had also advised Hillary Clinton, had promised to “look under the hood” at Constellation. And when it did, it found all sorts of problems. The costs were skyrocketing, the schedule was slipping, and there was frustration that yet another attempt by a president to re-create the Apollo magic was falling short.

Bush’s plan became fodder for late-night television, which mocked an ambition for space exploration that a generation earlier had been venerated for achieving the impossible. Not that long ago, the United States had reached the moon, but its space program had since had so many false starts, been subject to so many unfulfilled political promises, that now the critics were quick to pierce the soaring rhetoric and bring it back to the ground.

“He wants to build like a space station on the moon, and then from the moon, he wants to launch people to Mars,” David Letterman said in one of his monologues. “You know what this means, ladies and gentlemen? He’s been drinking again.”

Cernan’s prophecy was in trouble. And his prediction that Apollo 17, the last of the lunar missions, “was the end of the beginning, and not the end,” seemed increasingly hollow. By 2008, when Obama was elected, the moon seemed as distant as ever. The Next Giant Leap was going to once again be postponed.

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