Political Will? More Like Political Won’t

Musings of an Aging Mind

By Jack Bagley

Before you ask, no – I am not abandoning my firm position of not talking about politics, regardless of what the title of this column says. Two things I never discuss are religion and politics, and for primarily the same reason – I have friends on both sides of the issues, and I don’t want to lose any of them.
This column isn’t about politics per se, though. You’ll catch on as we go along.
At the time of this column appearing, we are only a few days away from the scheduled launch of Artemis 2, the first manned mission in the Artemis space flight program. Artemis 2 is the mission that will finally take astronauts back to the Moon – and that’s what I want to talk about.  
Why did it take so long to go back to the Moon?
I vividly remember watching, on that warm July evening in 1969, the grainy footage live from the Moon of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the surface. All three of the TV networks were covering the mission, of course – the biggest thing to happen to humanity in the last 2000 years wasn’t going to be preempted by reruns of Leave It to Beaver, that was for sure. It’s generally accepted that CBS had the overall best coverage, what with Walter Cronkite manning the anchor desk.
As something of a science nerd, however, I was watching ABC, because while Cronkite was an avid fan of the space program, ABC’s Jules Bergman was more of a science reporter. I appreciated that, a lot.
It was a wonderful thing, watching the space program build toward that magnificent moment. The fact that we went back to the Moon six more times (with five successes) was the icing on the cake.
Then … nothing.
All of that technology development to land people on the Moon and we just let it die off.
Why?
Because of a lack of political will, among other things.
The power of the purse is held by Congress, and once we’d put people into space – then on the Moon – there didn’t seem to be much of a reason, as they saw it, to go back. Science be hanged, there were problems on Earth that needed to be solved!
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in the fifty-plus years since Apollo 17 was the last lunar mission, we haven’t solved any of those problems. In fact, many have gotten worse, despite the massive amounts of money that has been thrown at them.
Finally, though, we’re going back to the Moon, with the Artemis 2 crew doing an updated version of the Apollo 8 mission – go out there and swing around the Moon, then come back. A test of the hardware, you might say, with four astronauts aboard.
While I am admiring the effort and can’t wait to follow the mission, I have to ask … what took so long? Why did we have to wait half a century to do it again?
It comes back to a case of political will – or, in this case, political won’t.
As I understand it, some members of Congress don’t think the space program is worth the money being spent on it.  Sure, we get new science, and we get new technology, but the cost is just too high to them. I really don’t understand that kind of opposition.
Others, I hear, want to make sure some of the money gets spent in their districts, no matter how far those districts may be from Florida or Texas. This I can understand, at least a little.
And a few see the value of a vigorous, expanding space program, and those are the ones I can support.
I mean, we even have now a branch of the military concerned with space! The Space Force was a fully logical extension of the U.S. military, even though it isn’t directly concerned with manned space flight (yet).
All that being said, one must remember that the first, most important job of any Congressman is getting re-elected. Making decisions that would solve problems or advance our society could mess up re-election because once the problems are indeed solved, why would we want to re-elect them?
There are numerous reasons we haven’t returned to the Moon in the past half century, but to me, they just don’t pass the smell test. The original plans called for us to have a permanent base there by now, and human exploration of Mars and the Asteroid Belt would also be going on. Those who control the money, however, didn’t see fit. That’s how Elon Musk’s SpaceX took such a commanding lead in space exploration.
Good luck, Artemis 2. Take us back to the Moon, and let’s head for the stars.