New Orlando, Mars

I’m going to Florida for a few days next month. I get on the plane and in less time than it took me to get to the airport during morning rush, I’m hanging out with Mickey and Minnie. Except for the post-9/11 security measures, not much has changed in airborne travel during the latter half of our boomer lives.

But wasn’t travel to Mars supposed to be routine by now? Or at the very least, we expected to have established a couple of bases on the red planet by 2006. During the era of the Apollo missions of 1969-1972, everything seemed possible, and we just assumed Mars was next. It’s been more than 30 years since we last landed on the lunar surface, and no human has yet to take a giant leap or even a small step on Martian soil.

Last year, President Bush spelled out a plan to go to Mars, but the speech outlining his vision didn’t have the same sense of urgency that President Kennedy’s challenge did regarding the moon. Kennedy was willing to spend the bucks, and the psychological competition between the United States and the then Soviet Union fueled the fire.

JFK painted quite a picture during his now-famous speech on the campus of Rice University on September 12, 1962:
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.

Fourteen months later he was assassinated. But just six months short of the end of that decade, an American left footprints on the moon.

President Bush’s Martian intentions are good, and I certainly see the value of space exploration, the subsequent science and eventual practical application of that science. But 39 years and 1 day after Kennedy announced his important decision, Bush was faced with ominous events resulting from airplane flights into buildings at the hands of terrorists, and from that point forward dedicated his presidency to the eradication of terrorism. That battle and the Iraq War, just or not, will be the financial focus of the remainder of his presidency and many to come.

I don’t think we’ll see Disney Mars in the boomer era.