It’s twenty years today since Challenger was lost with all aboard. It was the first real blow to NASA’s confidence in its ability to advance us in space, or that our space policy was sound. It finally shattered illusions about twenty-four flights a year, to which the agency had been clinging up until that event, but it wasn’t severe enough to really make a major change in direction. That took the loss of Columbia, three years ago this coming Tuesday.

Unfortunately, while that resulted finally in a policy decision to retire the ill-fated Shuttle program, the agency seems to have learned the wrong lessons from it–they should have come to realize that we need more diversity in space transport, and it cannot be a purely government endeavor. Instead, harkening back to their glory days of the sixties, the conclusion seems to be that, somehow (and inexplicably) the way to affordability and sustainability is exactly the approach that was unaffordable and unsustainable the last time we did it.

But one has to grant that Apollo was safe, and probably the new system will be more so than the Shuttle was. But safety shouldn’t be the highest goal of the program. Opening frontiers has always been dangerous, and it’s childish to think that this new one should be any different. The tragedy of Challenger and Columbia wasn’t that we lost astronauts. The tragedy was that we lost them at such high cost, and for missions of such trivial value.

This is the other false lesson learned from Challenger (and Columbia)–that the American people won’t accept the loss of astronauts. But we’ve shown throughout our history that we’re willing to accept the loss of brave men and women (even in recent history) as long as it is in a worthy cause. But NASA’s goal seems to be to create yet another appallingly expensive infrastructure whose focus is on recapitulating the achievements of four decades (five decades, by the time they eventually manage it, assuming they keep to their stated schedule) ago.

Will the American people be inspired by that? I can’t say–I only know that I am not.

Would they be inspired by a more ambitious program, a riskier program that involved many more people going into space at more affordable costs, even if (or perhaps because) it is a greater hazard to the lives of the explorers? I surely would. But it seems unlikely that we’re going to get that from the current plan, or planners.