Barack Obama, the anti-Kennedy

I firmly believe that when we look back at the history of the Obama administration, we will recall February 1, 2010 the date of one of its most fateful mistakes.

Today the Administration announced the cancellation of the Constellation program to replace the space shuttle and provide the hardware with which to return to the moon. Essentially the United States government is opting out of manned space flight, turning it over to a private sector with neither the resources nor the time to meet the challenges which must be met if America is to avoid permanent second or third-class status in space

The magnitude of this blunder can only be appreciated by someone of my generation, who remembers the dual national traumas of Sputnik I in 1957 and Vostok I in 1961. First the Russians beat us into space with the world's first artificial satellite, and then with the world's first manned space mission. That America's prestige around the world took an unprecedented beating was the least of the problem. Our own national self-esteem suffered a blow from which it didn't fully recover until Apollo 11 landed on the moon nearly a decade later.

With the President's decision to abandon manned space flight to the Chinese, the Russians, and perhaps the Indians and the Europeans, we will quickly fall far behind all of them in space. We can be sure that it will be a citizen of one of those nations- probably a Chinese- who will next set foot upon the moon at a time when we will be in no position to match the achievement for years and perhaps decades to come. At a time when China is threatening to equal or even surpass us both economically and militarily, the consequences would go far beyond space.

President Obama said in his State of the Union address that he was unwilling for the United States to be number two. Apparently so; today's decision ensures that we will be at best number three- and perhaps even number four or number five- in manned space flight for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, it will not be until the Russian-or, more likely, Chinese- flag is planted on the moon's surface that most of us will realize just how second-rate we will have become in the one area of human and scientific endeavor in which our supremacy was once unchallenged.

And before anyone even says it, the economy is no excuse. The Apollo program not only created more jobs in a shorter time than any other government enterprise short of a world war in our history, but generated exponentially more money than we spent on it. Not only proceding to the moon and then to Mars, but mounting a crash program to do so, might well have been the most effective thing the government could have done to set the economy on the right track.

But now Barack Obama will now go down in history as the anti-Kennedy, the man who effectively ended our manned space program and condemned the United States to what may well be permanent status as a second-rate nation in space. It is hard to overstate the folly of this decision. And sadly, it will not be until totalitarian China or authoritarian Russia plants its flag upon the lunar surface that the American people will realize just how badly they were served by it.