Grounded

Our nation will greet the tenth month of the tenth year of this millennium unable to do something we were the second nation ever to do and have been able to do since May 5, 1961: Put someone into space.

The shuttle Discovery is scheduled to fly to the International Space Station in September to deliver parts and some supplies to the ISS. After that, the shuttle fleet will be retired, although the "Launch On Need" rescue mission that's held on standby when a shuttle orbiter is in space might be refitted as a full-scale flight.

The Orion portion of NASA's Constellation program has been scheduled as the replacement for the shuttle orbiter, but would not have begun flights before the middle of the decade. President Obama recommended cancellation of the program back in February, saying it was "over budget, behind schedule, and lacking in innovation." I'll bow to his experience in such matters, considering the lack of health-care legislation he said we had to have by August 2009, the trillions of dollars in debt he's already helped rack up and the trillions more he wants to approve and the fact that he's so far been nothing more in the White House than Jimmy Carter with a funny name and an annoying tendency to bow to people he's supposed to be on the same head-of-state footing as. Here's hoping voters cancel his program on Nov. 6, 2012, unless my fellow Democrats wise up and do it during the primary season.

Should Americans want to go into space, we'll hitch a ride with the Russians, who have somehow managed to keep a space program running while their country goes through much rougher times than we've ever thought about. Or maybe on a ship from China, or potentially India, since the years it will take U.S. spaceflight to recover from this monumentally shortsighted decision will probably be enough for both nations to develop strong humans-in-space programs.

I can't argue that NASA has been all that inspiring or that the president's critique of the Constellation program as over-budget, behind schedule and lacking in innovation is inaccurate. NASA hasn't inspired much since funding cuts and bureaucratic myopia forced it to take a step backward after landing on the moon. The blame for which, like so many other things, lies with President Nixon. I would think though, since I am just an ordinary joe who's never had the brains to hold public office, that the thing to do with a broken something is try to make it a fixed something. Especially if I've already spent quite a bit of money on it.

President Obama made the themes of hope and change centerpieces of his campaign for the White House. Even though he had very little experience, he persuaded many people that what he did have -- a vision for a great nation being made even greater -- would make him succeed as a president. This cancellation decision demonstrates that perception was in error. We stood alone among nations as the only people from Earth who had ever set foot on the surface of a world not our own. Now we mill around at the taxi stand with everyone else from Chad to Lithuania to Mongolia, waiting for the chance to pay someone else to take us someplace we paved the way to.

In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis warned of the dangers inherent in becoming a people who turn away from risk and who aim our gaze inward and downward alone instead of also upward and outward. He called them "men without chests," and said we would vainly expect "virtue and enterprise" from such. If he were indeed that kind of person, President Obama would not be the only such leader in the world today, or even the only such leader in our nation. And while it's really too early to see that in him, it's later than it used to be.

I shy away from judgments that label a particular president "the worst ever" or even "the best ever." History may show that a fellow who was thought awful at the time was really better than people figured. Or that someone who was seen as exceptionally skilled was really just pretty good at looking like he knew what was going on. So no matter how many blatant failures President Obama manages to ring up during what I personally hope is his only term in office, I could never justify calling him the "worst ever."

But I feel safe in saying he has so far proven to be the man with the shortest horizons of the last fifty years. And I don't know that history will judge him well for being the president who declared the New Frontier closed and who ended the wide-open dream of an earlier president who knew what vision truly was.