Collin R. Skocik

Good luck to Space Shuttle Discovery. A fuel leak has been discovered; NASA engineers seem confident that it's nothing to worry about, but after the Columbia disaster I'm a bit jittery about shuttle problems, especially since the shuttles were grounded a few years ago due to fuel line problems and the foam problem STILL isn't fixed. But there's a shuttle in space, which is a more hopeful state of affairs than we've had in a while, and so far the mission seems to be a resounding success. With any luck NASA has things back together again. Even with increasing private interest in space flight, I'd like to see NASA fix its problems, because I think it will be a while before private industry is capable of long-term missions like returning to the Moon or going to Mars. And even when it is feasible, I doubt private industry will be performing science missions for a while; space tourism seems to be the big thing. Not that that's really a bad thing, I'd like to see space tourism take off, and in fact I'd very much like to take a trip myself. Inevitably most transportation, even from one place on Earth to another, will involve short space flights. But so far NASA is still the most successful space organization in the world, and is still primarily devoted to scientific missions. At this stage of development, I consider scientific exploration of Mars, asteroids, and the moons of Jupiter more important to human survival than turning those places into vacation spots.

In a slightly different vein, Leonardo Da Vinci drew spacecraft long before rocketry. Robert Goddard proved rockets could escape Earth's gravity and make space flight possible. We always remember the names of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as the astronaut pioneers -- as well we should; few of us could match their courage, stamina, and dedication to walk on an alien world. But I'd just like to take a moment to remember the man who made it happen: Lyndon Baines Johnson. The dreams of Da Vinci, Verne, and Wells were just that, dreams. Goddard proved space flight COULD be done -- but it took someone making the firm decision to go ahead and try it in order for the dream to become reality. It was Lyndon Johnson who pressed for a national space agency and set us on the path to the Moon, and whose legacy today is the national Moon/Mars initiative. Today most space advocates press for privatization of space efforts, certainly a justifiable position given the current state of NASA and the success of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne, but would any of these things have been done were it not for Johnson's committment to going ahead with it? Sure, Johnson's political motivations were comparitively short-sighted and maybe even illogical, but the fact is he did it, whatever the political forces that motivated him. My hat is off to Goddard, Werner Von Braun, Chris Kraft, the Mercury astronauts and all the astronauts who followed, but since Johnson is so rarely remembered as the man who started it all, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge him.