I have resisted saying too much about the two astronauts whose eight-day mission to the International Space Station in June has turned, perforce, into an eight-month stay, lasting (at least) until February next year. Mainly because its awful symbolism is too pathetic, in both the archaic and contemporary senses. There has been remarkably little high-level official reaction - to the point that Kamala is so oblivious to whatever's going on up there that her campaign slogan is "We're not going back." Yeah, tell it to Suni and Butch.
The US used to be both sunny and butch - and the Vice President certainly has no plans to "go back" to that lost world. Make America Sunny and Butch Again! The crippled Boeing Starliner is supposed to return to the US sans crew tomorrow morning at approx 6am GMT - or just after midnight local time, so the TV audience will be fairly minimal. The symbolism is larger than merely Boeing, just another once great brand running on fumes. The Suni & Butch flight was also the first launch of a manned spacecraft from Cape Canaveral since 1968. It is easy to get out of a habit, and hard to recover it - whether it be the habit of human space flight, of assembling ad hoc floating harbours off sea coasts, or of respecting a general right to freedom of expression. On all three fronts, to reprise an old catchphrase, nothing works anymore.
Neither Nasa nor Boeing has any desire to ask Elon Musk or Vladimir Putin to bring back their crew. So the stranded Americans sit there, enduring yet another high-level fiasco. For Steyn readers, it may evoke a certain passage from my book After America, and the words of Professor Bruce Charlton (since retired):
The real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.
Fifty-six years since that last manned flight took off from Cape Canaveral, it is certainly easier to see the moon landings as I portrayed them in After America - not as a bright new dawn, but as the last flickering fag end of the nineteenth century's golden age of exploration and invention. This is what I said almost a decade-and-a-half back:
Half a century ago, the future felt different. Take 1969, quite a year in the aerospace biz: In one twelve month period, we saw the test flight of the Boeing 747, the maiden voyage of the Concorde, the RAF's deployment of the Harrier "jump jet" ...and Neil Armstrong's "giant step for mankind". Buzz Aldrin packed a portable tape player with him on Apollo 11, and so Sinatra's ring-a-ding-ding recording of "Fly Me To The Moon" became the first (human) music to be flown to the moon and played there. Had any other nation beaten Nasa to it, they'd have marked the occasion with the "Ode To Joy" or Also Sprach Zarathustra, something grand and formal. But there's something marvelously American about the first human being to place his feet on the surface of a heavenly sphere standing there with a cassette machine blasting out Frank and the Count Basie band in a swingin' Quincy Jones arrangement - the insouciant swagger of the American century breaking the bounds of the planet.
Yes, indeed. Sunny and butch, one might say. I went on:
In 1961, before the eyes of the world, President Kennedy had set American ingenuity a very specific challenge – and put a clock on it:
This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
That's it. No wiggle room. A monkey on the moon wouldn't count, nor an unmanned drone, nor a dune buggy that can't take off again but transmits grainy footage back to Houston as it rusts up in the crater it came to rest in. The only way to win the bet is with a real-live actual American standing on the surface of the moon planting the Stars and Stripes. Even as it happened, the White House was so cautious that William Safire wrote President Nixon a speech to be delivered in the event of disaster:
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace...
Yet America did it. "Fly Me To The Moon/Let me sing forever more." What comes after American yearning and achievement? Democratization: "Everybody Gets To Go The Moon". That all but forgotten Jimmy Webb song from 1969 catches the spirit of the age:
Isn't it a miracle
That we're the generation
That will touch that shiny bauble with our own two hands?
Whatever happened to that?
Four decades later, Bruce Charlton, Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham in England, wrote that "that landing of men on the moon and bringing them back alive was the supreme achievement of human capability, the most difficult problem ever solved by humans." That's a good way to look at it: The political class presented the boffins with a highly difficult and specific problem and they solved it – in eight years. Charlton continued:
Forty years ago, we could do it – repeatedly – but since then we have not been to the moon, and I suggest the real reason we have not been to the moon since 1972 is that we cannot any longer do it. Humans have lost the capability.
Of course, the standard line is that humans stopped going to the moon only because we no longer wanted to go to the moon, or could not afford to, or something... But I am suggesting that all this is BS... I suspect that human capability reached its peak or plateau around 1965-75 – at the time of the Apollo moon landings – and has been declining ever since.
Can that be true? Charlton is a controversialist gadfly in British academe, but, comparing 1950 to the early twenty-first century, our time traveler from 1890 might well agree with him. And, if you think about it, isn't it kind of hard even to imagine America pulling off a moon mission now? The countdown, the takeoff, a camera transmitting real-time footage of a young American standing in a dusty crater beyond our planet blasting out from his iPod Lady Gaga and the Black-Eyed Peas or whatever the 21st century version of Sinatra and the Basie band is... It half-lingers in collective consciousness as a memory of faded grandeur, the way a nineteenth-century date farmer in Nasiriyah might be dimly aware that the Great Ziggurat of Ur used to be around here someplace.
So what happened? According to Professor Charlton, in the 1970s "the human spirit began to be overwhelmed by bureaucracy". The old can-do spirit? Oh, you can try to do it, but they'll toss every obstacle in your path. Go on, give it a go: Invent a new medical device; start a company; go to the airport to fly to DC and file a patent. Everything's longer, slower, more soul-crushing. And the decline in "human capability" will only worsen in the years ahead, thanks not just to excess bureaucracy but insufficient cash.
"Yes, we can!" droned the dopey Obamatrons of 2008. No, we can't, says Charlton, not if you mean "land on the moon, swiftly win wars against weak opposition and then control the defeated nation, secure national borders, discover breakthrough medical treatments, prevent crime, design and build to a tight deadline, educate people so they are ready to work before the age of 22..."
Houston, we have a much bigger problem.
[UPDATE: That's a most interesting selection by Professor Charlton - and on every measure things have got worse:
~It's not just that we can't "win wars against weak opposition" but also that, upon throwing in the towel, we leave behind enough military-industrial-complex state-of-the-art toys to make a bunch of goatherds one of the Top Ten armed forces on the planet;
~It's not just that we can't "secure national borders", but that the institutions meant to secure them - the US Department of Homeland Security, the UK Border Force, successive German chancellors - are on the side of the invaders;
~It's not just a lack of "breakthrough medical treatments", it's that we now mandate entirely unnecessary treatments that increase your risk of heart disease, accelerate your cancer and render you infertle;
~It's not just that we can't "prevent crime", it's that in American cities property crime is simply no longer charged and across the Atlantic Sir Keir Starmer's response to the average Islamo-stabbing is to toss you in gaol for tweeting about it;
~As for educating people to work by the age of twenty-two, the EU "student" visa applies to anyone thirty or under. We are children till early middle age.
So, since Charlton wrote those words, we're worse on all fronts.]
To be sure, there's still something called "Nasa" and it still stands for the "National Aeronautics and Space Administration". But there's not a lot of either aeronautics or space in the in-box of the agency's head honcho. A few days after Charlton penned his elegy for human capability, Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden appeared on al-Jazeera and explained the brief he'd been given by President Obama:
One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering.
Islam: The final frontier! To boldly go where no diversity outreach consultant has gone before! What's "foremost" for Nasa is to make Muslims "feel good" about their contributions to science. Why, as recently as the early ninth century Muhammad al-Khwarizmi invented the first universal horary quadrant! Things have been a little quiet since then, or at least since Taqi-al-Din's observatory in Istanbul was razed to the ground by the Sultan's janissaries in 1580. If you hear a Muslim declaring "We have lift off!", it's likely to be a triumphant ad-lib after lighting up his crotch. As far as I recall, the most recent Islamic contribution to the subject of space exploration came from Britain's most prominent imam, Abu Hamza, who in 2003 declared that the fate of the space shuttle Columbia was God's punishment "because it carried Americans, an Israeli and a Hindu, a trinity of evil against Islam".
It's easy to laugh at the likes of Abu Hamza, although not as easy as it should be, not in Europe and Canada, where the state is eager to haul you into court for "Islamophobia". But the laugh's on us. Nasa is the government agency whose acronym was known around the planet, to every child who looked up at the stars and wondered what technological marvels the space age would have produced by the time he was out of short pants. Now the starry-eyed moppets are graying boomers, and the agency that symbolized man's reach for the skies has transformed itself into a self-esteem boosterism operation. Is there an accompanying book – Muslims Are from Mars, Infidels Are from Venus?
There's your American decline right there: From out-of-this-world to out-of-our-minds, an increasingly unmanned flight from real, historic technological accomplishment to unreal, ahistorical therapeutic touchy-feely multiculti.
So we can't go to the moon. And, by the time you factor in getting to the airport to do the shoeless shuffle and the enhanced patdown, flying to London takes longer than it did in 1960. If they were trying to build the transcontinental railroad now, they'd be spending the first three decades on the environmental-impact study and hammering in the Golden Spike to celebrate the point at which the Feasibility Commission's expansion up from the fifth floor met the Zoning Board's expansion down from the twelfth floor.
Thirteen years later, that's all that's left. The above passage from After America, attracts criticism both from the Nasa types and those who think the whole man-on-the-moon thing was a crashing bore. Nevertheless, the modern world was built by men who ventured beyond the edge of the map, and in that sense the stasis of the last half-century, in anything other than the electronic anklet of the "smart phone", is both unusual and a little disturbing. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the original landing, The New York Times wondered when a woman might reach the moon - which sounds a humourless rewrite of the old feminist gag that "if they can put a man on the moon, why can't they put them all there?" To be sure, we've since invented AI, which will make it much easier to fake the next moon landing. Nevertheless...
The Wright brothers' first flight was in 1903. Fifty-nine years later, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, and seven years after that Buzz Aldrin became the first man to fly to the moon... Half a century from the Wright brothers to The Right Stuff - from nosediving into the neighbor's cornfield to walking the surface of the moon - followed by half a century devoid of giant leaps and even small steps.
When After America came out, I was booked on "Fox & Friends" to talk it over with Brian Kilmeade. Sitting next to Brian on the couch waiting to get going, I watched Steve Doocy across the studio link to an item on the space shuttle Enterprise beginning its journey to whichever museum it's wound up at. Steve called it "historic", and, as I remarked to Brian, pity the nation whose greatness becomes "historic" - whose spacecraft exist only in museums.
In 1961 the Soviets had it all over the Americans in the space race: They had already reached the moon, with the unmanned flight Luna 2, and they had put a man in space, Yuri Gagarin. Gagarin and the cosmonauts were inspirational figures well beyond the Warsaw Pact. By contrast, all the US unmanned missions had been failures, and their astronauts were earthbound - or sub-orbital at best. Kennedy was cautioned against his moon speech on the grounds that he was setting America up for very public humiliation.
But he chose to go ahead.
And now? Great civilisations can survive a lot of things, but not impoverishment of spirit. As I commented a few years back:
Those "Space Age" astronauts were men of boundless courage and determination: they strapped themselves in and stared not just death in the face but death in hideous and unknown ways. Yet they were also ordinary men, who were called upon to do extraordinary things and rose to the challenge. These days we are unmanned in more than merely the sense of that Luna 2 expedition. Glenn and Armstrong are gone, and their surviving comrades are old and stooped and wizened, and yet the only giants we have.
Space may still be the final frontier, but today, when we talk about boldly going where no man has gone before, we mean the ladies' bathroom. Progress.
~the above material is adapted from Mark's bestseller After America. Personally autographed copies are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore. If you're a Mark Steyn Club member, don't forget to enter your Club promo code at checkout to receive the special member pricing - and do feel free to agree or disagree in the comments section.
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