NASA finally has road map back to moon, Mars

The words hit me like a brick to the face.  

They weren’t anything I didn’t already know, but hearing them out loud was overwhelming. And sad.

“We can’t get to the moon right now. We can’t even launch an American into low earth orbit anymore. We can’t get to the International Space Station without paying $70 million per seat to the Russians — the Russians. Our only backup is the Chinese.”

Embarrassing. Stupid. Puzzling. 

Those words were spoken to me by Congressman Steven Palazzo (MS-4), who passionately shares my view that we should be pushing hard to send astronauts back to the moon, on to Mars and beyond. It’s our last frontier.

And ask yourself this: Do you really want Russia or China or, God forbid, North Korea to one day rule space? Talk about sitting ducks on earth … we would be defenseless. So would every other nation.

I spoke with Palazzo a few days after a House Appropriations Committee meeting with NASA’s acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, about where exactly our space program is aiming.

Lightfoot mentioned that NASA would continue to study the earth, its climate change and what is causing it.

Palazzo countered with a gentle nudge, which he repeated during our conversation: “There are 12 federal agencies already studying Earth. And that’s important. But let them study Earth. NASA needs to turn its focus toward bigger things, like deep space. Like the moon and Mars.”

Lightfoot later said during the meeting that NASA’s goal of sending a human to Mars by 2033 remains on track, but he made it plain that it will take congressional funding.

Palazzo is trying, but it's going to take his colleagues seeing the big picture, too

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I’m fortunate to call Fred Haise, the Apollo 13 astronaut from Biloxi, a friend. He has told me more than a dozen times, “We’ll go back to the moon when Congress will fund the program. Until then, it won’t happen.”

Regardless of one’s party stance, we should applaud President Trump's signing of NASA’s Transition Authorization Act of 2017. It is a bill Palazzo worked tirelessly on during his five years as chairman of the House Space Subcommittee. 

“That bill is basically a road map for where we want to go with our space program,” Palazzo said.

“It helps NASA focus on ‘What is my target? Where do we want to be in five years, 10 years, 20 years?’ That’s been one of NASA’s biggest problems the past 10 years or longer, always changing priorities.

“What this creates is a map to launch American astronauts on American rockets from American soil to the moon or Mars.”

Palazzo pointed out one of the obstacles that must be sent packing: “We have become too risk-averse.”

In other words, we’re scared. 

The shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986 scared us. The loss of  the shuttle Columbia crew during reentry in 2003 scared us. And we haven’t gotten over it.

Well, guess what? If you could ask the 14 astronauts who died in those two tragedies, I guarantee you every one of them would be urging us to move forward with the space program. They understood its importance as much as anyone.

And since when did America let fear paralyze us? It didn't when we stormed the beaches at Normandy in 1944. It didn't in 1969 when Neil Armstrong, who grew up in a small Ohio town, became the first human to set foot on another world.

And know this: A little more than two years before that, America lost three astronauts — Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chafee — in a fire during a pure oxygen test on the launch pad.

It was a sickening tragedy. White had performed our first spacewalk during the Gemini program. Grissom was our country’s second human in space. He flew again during Gemini. Americans knew those men from their earlier missions. 

The United States handled the accident as it should have: Safety improvements to the command module were made following an investigation into what caused the fire. A program that was launching astronauts every two or three months fell silent. Twenty-one months passed before NASA launched Apollo 7, the first of the three-man missions, into earth orbit.

Two months later, NASA showed the world the true meaning of grit. It sent the next flight, Apollo 8, in orbit around the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, and returned Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders safely back to earth.

Seven months later, we were walking on the moon. Walking there because President Kennedy gave his speech in September 1962 at Rice Stadium in Houston that he wanted American astronauts to land on the moon and return safely by the end of the decade.

Remember Kennedy’s words? 

“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 we intend to win.”

As Palazzo said: “Sending people into space is never easy, and never without risk. And we have to balance risk and reward. But we have to look at the road map. If we keep looking backward, we’re never going to move forward.

“You know who really wants to take on this challenge? The astronauts. They don’t want to just orbit the earth, they want to go to the moon … and they want to also go to the two moons of Mars.”

A new astronaut class was recently announced. Seven men and five women were selected from a pool of 18,353 applicants,. That exceeded the previous record number of applicants by more than 10,000.

“Somewhere in that class might be the first person to walk on Mars,” Palazzo said.

Of course Mississippi fits into any plans NASA has to go back to the moon and on to Mars. The engines that will get them there will be tested on the Gulf Coast, an area Palazzo serves, at Stennis Space Center.

Stennis also tested all the engines that sent men to the moon. It will be nice to hear the unbelievable thunder of those tests again. “We still have our buffer zone, but some say they might hear these as far away as Mobile,” Palazzo said.

Those who are afraid, get out of the way.

It’s time to rumble.

Contact Billy Watkins at 601-961-7282 or bwatkins@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter.