Since the first flowering of the space age, there are two traditional dates for American presidents to make announcements of grand new space initiatives.

The first is the annual State of the Union address, in which the President not only describes events of the past year, but new initiatives and goals for the next.

This was the context in which, in January 1984, President Ronald Reagan announced that the United States would build a space station within a decade.

Unfortunately, it's been almost two decades, and the station is not yet complete, although we brought in international partners to "help."

The second is the anniversary of the first landing of men on the Moon and (not entirely coincidentally), the anniversary of the landing of the first Viking probe on Mars, July 20th.

In 1989, George Herbert Walker Bush chose the latter date to give a speech on the Mall, in which, in an attempt to address his perceived lack of the "vision thing," he announced a "Space Exploration Initiative." If any remember that ill-fated announcement, it was as a call to the nation to send Americans to Mars, because the culmination of it was a manned Mars landing in 2019, three decades after the initial announcement. But it was actually much more than that. In the words of the president, we would:

"...return to the Moon, this time to stay, and then on to Mars, and settle the solar system."

But few remember any of it now, because it was strangled in the cradle by a cynical space agency that had no desire to do anything beyond earth orbit. The NASA administrator at the time, Richard Truly, actually had his congressional liaison lobby against it on Capitol Hill (one of the reasons that he was later fired and replaced by Dan Goldin).

When the agency put forth its report of what would be involved, it gathered up all of the technology sandboxes and hobbyshops around the NASA centers, and used it as an excuse to justify everything that the agency had done, was doing, and wanted to do. The bill came out to half a trillion dollars. It died aborning.

But these anniversaries have been used for other announcements as well. In 1986, the hope was that the State of the Union address by President Reagan would be a triumphant announcement of the first teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe (NASA just recently reinitiated this program).

Sadly, instead, the speech, delayed by tragedy, was partly a eulogy. In the first paragraph, the President said:

Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, distinguished members of the Congress, honored guests and fellow citizens, thank you for allowing me to delay my address until this evening. We paused together to mourn and honor the valor of our seven Challenger heroes . And I hope that we are now ready to do what they would want us to do--go forward America and reach for the stars. We will never forget those brave seven, but we shall go forward.

Barely a week earlier, the space shuttle Challenger had been destroyed on ascent, with the loss of all crew aboard, including Ms. McAuliffe, while millions of schoolchildren (most of whom are now adults) watched, live on television.

Of all the possible shuttle launches to incur such a catastrophe, there couldn't have been a worse one. Launches had become routine in the almost half a decade since the first flight in 1981, and few normally watched them. But the eyes of the nation, including all of the schools, were on this one because of the first teacher astronaut.

Also, this was a flight that "looked like America." In addition to Christa and the pilots, it had Judy Resnik, a female Jewish astronaut from Ohio, Ellison Onizuka, a Japanese-American, Ron McNair, an African-American, and Greg Jarvis, a non-NASA employee, who was doing research for his company, Hughes Space and Communications.

The trauma for the nation was the greatest since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, almost a quarter of a century earlier, because it had grown to believe that NASA could do no wrong, and the sudden sense of its fallibility came as a shock.

I find it particularly memorable because it occurred on the anniversary of the date of my birth. As someone who was working on the program at the time, I've written my own memories of that date at my weblog. Others' memories of that sad day can be found here and here.

Next Tuesday, January 28, will be the seventeenth anniversary of that event. It happens to coincide with the next State of the Union address by President George W. Bush.

I hope that he will note the sad anniversary. I also expect him to have somber news regarding foreign affairs, and I expect that he will announce that we will soon be once again actively at war, perhaps within the next couple of weeks.

But rumors abound that he will announce something else, to give us hope for a brighter future, and a vision for not just this nation and world, but for a universe into which we can expand, and bring forth unending freedom and opportunity and life, in the midst of our monumental struggle against those who would deprive us of all, had they their way.

It is expected that he will announce, if not in this address, then in the announcement of the 2004 budget, an initiative to develop new, badly needed power sources for space activities. They will be nuclear power sources, an avenue of research that has been cut off for years for both fiscal and political reasons.

In-space nuclear power will bring the ability to survive the chilly sun-starved two-week nights of the Moon. It will power the rockets that can deliver us to Mars in a few weeks, rather than a few months. It will provide the basis for an ability to control asteroids, not just to prevent them from ending our species as they did the dinosaurs, but to harvest their bounty.

The project has been appropriately called Prometheus, after the Titan of Greek mythology who granted humans the gift of fire, and power, something previously the privilege of the gods alone. For his beneficence, he was condemned by the gods to an eternity of misery, chained to a rock to have his liver eaten by an eagle and regrown to be devoured again and again.

Lord Byron described it best:

TITAN! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,
Seen in their sad reality,
Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense...

If NASA can deliver such an equivalent boon to us now, it will deserve not punishment, but praise, for as long as humankind exists in the universe.

Sorry, the Greens will never allow nuclear power in space. They had a fit when Cassini went up...now they would really organize and turn public opinion against the use of fissile material.

I actually hope the Chinese get on the stick and go nuts in regards to space exploration. The only real reason we went to the moon in the first place was to piss off the Russkies. We need another space race.

I doubt that the man from Crawford is afraid of a few dope smoking, FM listening, sandal wearing, lice infested greenies.

As for another space race-while I know Rand disagrees with me-look to what China is working on.

Rand,

All the school children who watched the Challenger disaster are now adults. 1986 was 17 years ago. 17+4=21. Hell, 17+1=18 -- the voting age.

More thoughts later, if I get the time.

"Barely a week earlier, the space shuttle Challenger had been destroyed on ascent, with the loss of all crew aboard, including Ms. McAuliffe, while millions of schoolchildren (most of whom are now adults) watched, live on television."

If so, those on the Left coast weren't watching the Today Show. That's where I tuned in to see the launch, and the first I saw of anything having to do with it was a sudden cut away from the talking heads to a live shot of something small falling through the sky. It took several minutes, it seemed to me, before anyone on NBC announced what had happened.

Just a nit:

"In 1989, George Herbert Walker Bush chose the latter date to give a speech on the Mall, in which, in an attempt to address his perceived lack of the "vision thing," he announced a "Space Exploration Initiative." If any remember that ill-fated announcement, it was as a call to the nation to send Americans to Mars, because the culmination of it was a manned Mars landing in 2019, two decades after the initial announcement."

20 years would make it 2009, not 2019. Did you mean that or three decades?

Doh!

I was only off by fifty percent...

Thanx.

My birthday falls on some pretty important milestones in space also. July 20th, Huzzah!

Alas, I remember the Challenger disaster vividly. I was in the 5th grade and we had just come back from the lunchroom and I was just sitting down at my desk when the substitute teacher we had that day came in with a sullen look. She told us that the Space Shuttle had just exploded and proceeded to turned on the TV. We all silently watched as they replayed over and over again the ascent and then the explosion. I was and still am quite upset about the tragedy.

Spaceflight Now has a timeline describing the split second telemetry beamed down from the Challenge during the ascent leading up to the disaster.

http://spaceflightnow.com/challenger/timeline/

Loved the piece, Rand, although I have to admit to being somewhat surprised by your take on the Prometheus project. Granted, it's a wonderful new piece of technology (or rather it will be, if it becomes operational), but as you have stated many times in the past, it is not lack of technology that's keeping launch costs high, and by extension keeping us out of space. I expected your comment to be something along the lines of "it sounds like a great idea, but it won't really help us go anywhere as long as launch costs to LEO are still in the $1000/pound range".

What is it, exactly, about Prometheus that you find so promising? Could nuclear electric propulsion and space reactors really make that much of a difference if we're still sticking to our old launch models?

Well, I've got limited word count in a column (and this is today's Fox News column), so I didn't want to open up too many cans. But I do believe that while space reactors are not sufficient, they are certainly necessary, so while they contribute little to getting us "halfway to anywhere," they do make it a lot easier to get the rest of the way once we solve that problem.

When I say we don't need new technology, I'm talking primarily about the launch problem (and even there, new technology is nice to have, but it enhances, not enables). I do think we need new technology for beyond LEO, and I'm happy to see it being developed in parallel with activities that get us off the planet itself.

My birthday happens to be the day before, when challenger was due to launch. It's also Holocaust memorial day. Happy birthday for tuesday

Yes, and Jane Galt's is the day after, I believe.

I almost worked for Rockwell - coming out of college in 1982 they wanted me to work in the shuttle ascent group, but claimed that new hires were on hold while they sorted out who worked on the B-1 program. So instead I went to work for McDonnell Douglas on Delta designing launch trajectories. I still have my "Save Earth - Colonize Space" T-shirt from the Planetary Society I wear to the gym on occasion. It seems crazy, but space seemed so much more in our grasp in 1982 than in it does now. The romance and adventure seem to be gone. As long as NASA is the only game in town, it will be just another bureaucratic endeavor, devoid of all excitement, bogged down in infighting and regulation. A neighbor who used to be a biochemist working with Charlie Walker is a stock broker now. Sad, sad, sad.

Well, whatever the announcement, I hope that this time, it'll be different.

My most interesting Challenger story comes a few years after the tragedy.

During the 70s and 80s I did lots of dance photography. I was good enough at it that professional companies actually paid me for my work. People in the dance world knew I was into that "space stuff" but we didn't discuss it all that much. While I've done my bit to promote a space based civilization, it's not the be all and end all of my life.

I was delighted to learn in '88 that Dermot Burke of the Princeton Ballet (now known as the American Reporty Ballet) had choreographed a tribute to the Challenger astronauts. The ballet was quite good, even according to dance critics. What was Dermot's connection to aerospace? Well, he'd grown up in Florida. He also had the interest many creative people had in space exploration. No obsession, but a significant interest.

I naturally photographed the ballet and interviewed Dermot about why he did the piece. One thing sticks in my memory about that interview. Dermot wanted to know why NASA was dragging its feet about getting the shuttle flying again. I couldn't offer any sort of explanation at the time.

After getting the photos and interview, I approached the editor (forgotten his name -- not Leonard David, though) of whatever magazine the NSS was publishing at the time (Space World? or had it switched to Ad Astra?). Their normal cover photo was usually some sort of NASA handout. I thought they'd be quite interested in this ballet tribute.

I got a half assed brushoff.

Later on, I did manage to peddle said photos and interview to the U.S. Space Foundation. And I did manage to get an award out of the NSS for Dermot and the company eventually.

But that initial reaction spoke volumes about how insular and ignorant the aerospace establishment was. And Dermot's thoughtful comments showed how the more interested general public was already reacting to the stumbling NASA bureaucracy.

But that initial reaction spoke volumes about how insular and ignorant the aerospace establishment was.

Was, and in many ways, sadly, remains.

This was a really sad time.

This was a really sad time.

This was a really sad time.