Recent space related events—Space Ship One, continued shuttle problems, and the unfunded notion of sending humans back to the Moon and on to Mars—have made me think a bit about the United States' current manned space program.

NASA, it seems, is in the entertainment business. Thereby hangs a tale, a story of disappointment and loss of innocence. Namely, mine.

As luck had it, I grew up at the end of the space age. My earliest memory of television is a black and white picture of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon - all because I was making a racket and my dad yelled at me, "Shut up! This is important!" I was all of 3 at the time; but, somehow, I paid enough attention to still remember Armstrong bouncing down off that ladder.

Later, grade school regaled us with visions of incipient manned planetary missions. Viking was only a precursor to people; Skylab was simply a temporary outpost before we built permanently inhabited space stations serving as way points to the other planets. Later, in junior high, we heard all about the Voyager missions and this new space plane called the shuttle and how people would be going into space on a weekly if not daily basis. Space was to be my future.

High school was when I realized that something wasn't quite right. On the one hand, here were the scientists saying what a waste the space shuttle was - while on the other hand the news media oohed and aahed over every NASA press release as our leaders expounded upon the value of manned space exploration. What was going on? How could these science people be so heartless and have so little vision? I was confused.

I became even more confused when I realized that we actually weren't going anywhere. No one had left low Earth orbit since the Apollo 17 crew went to the moon in 1972. Still, I hoped fervently that our national will to send people to the Moon or Mars would somehow return. I didn't yet understand that this national will to explore space had less to do with space exploration than it did with Cold War politics.

I also had no idea how expensive such an endeavor is - no one ever told us anything about that. It was always that we were going into space for the noble goal of doing it because it's there and that Americans are simply born to be explorers. Now that I know what it costs, I am awe-struck that the ISS ever received Congressional approval. All I can figure is that it was a combination of the inertia of Cold War politics and NASA ordering their PR department to battle stations. I think our politicians are only now beginning to come to the same conclusion.

I think that sending people to explore Mars would be an outstanding thing to do; however, I know it won't happen any time soon. The money - actually, the political mandate from the people to spend the money - for such a venture simply isn't there. And not without good reason; there are far more pressing things right here that need our attention and funding. It'd be awfully hard to justify a trillion-dollar manned mission to Mars at any time in the foreseeable future.

I also hold that giving lip service to human space flight as we do now is not worth the money it's costing us. There has never been much scientific or industrial payoff to it. I think we can get our political gains and our entertainment cheaper elsewhere. If we cannot commit to doing our best - doing *real* exploration by way of sending people to Mars or Europa - then we should discontinue manned space flight. Let robotic probes do all of it. We should not expensively and unnecessarily place people and their support hardware into space if all we're going to do is film episode after episode of Stupid Human Tricks In Low Earth Orbit.

As such, I am now, deep down, quite angry with the way things turned out. We kids of the 70's were presented with an unspoken promise that we had a future in space operations. We were told to study hard in math and science, because that's what we'd be doing. So, with the planets and stars in our eyes, we cracked the books and learned all we could. We were going to travel all over the place, at least within the solar system.

I still wonder what happened. Perhaps my generation was outright lied to; or, perhaps the public's imagination and concerns turned towards more pressing issues, like the energy crisis and unemployment and inflation. I now understand politics well enough to know that the reasons are too many to number.

Nonetheless, I still feel like, "Dude, Where's My Space Program?"