I wrote this the other day and then got to thinking about it. Of course the men (mostly men) who decided to scale the US space program way back after Apollo didn’t think they were breaking promises. They just thought they were making policy. Further, they didn’t know they were scaling it back so far; first there was Skylab, and then the Shuttle was supposed to ferry things to it and given it a nudge back up when its orbit began to decay. And then each time they met again to make more policy, the program dwindled and drooped a bit more until Skylab fell out of the sky and the Shuttle became an enormously expensive shout-out (“We’re still here! Really! Not dead yet! Feeling much better!”) instead of the cheap, reliable and routine transportation it was intended to be. US Space Program: brought to you by the time-honored policy-making methodology of “nibbled by ants”.
The problem with policy is that it has major effects on people’s lives. When a policy goes on for a while then people get to relying on it. Even if legislators never intended to make a promise, citizens take it as one. It’s not just the space program, of course: things like Social Security and Medicaid are also promises. People build dreams on promises; I just think legislators should be a bit more cafeul about breaking them.
When they say, “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans,” they don’t even consider politics. Yes, we’ve been halted — temporarily.
I’ve believed in the possibilities of space exploration since before you were born, and I’m still excited by whatever we accomplish. We *can* be whatever we want, within the parameters of our society, and we can indeed stretch those parameters. Though I studied science, I became a mother and an office manager. A generation later, you and women like you became engineers.
So you might not work on the moon, but my grandchild could. And it’s still A GREAT ADVENTURE.