The wrong stuff.

• Author: Hines, William
• Position: Manned space exploration

I am of a generation that still distinguished between intellect and reason. Intellect separates the possible from the impossible, reason the sensible from the senseless. Space travel is a triumph of intellect but a tragic failure of reason. --Max Born (1882-1970)

July 20, 1994, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing, would be as good a time as any to can a halt to that vainglorious exercise in hubris known as manned space flight--at least until problems more relevant to the human condition have been solved and money is again available for institutionalized silliness. As Max Born, a 1954 Nobel Prize winner in physics, said not long before Eagle landed on the Sea of Tranquillity on July 20, 1969, somewhere en route to the moon we lost our way in the maze that separates intellect from reason.

An early end to our persistent man-in-space lunacy will not happen, of course; too many vested interests are working to keep the Space Shuttle flying. But there are signs that the end could be in sight as tight budgets constrict discretionary Federal spending and tax-shy legislators cast about for ways to avoid angering voters. Even one of the space program's most loyal defenders in Congress, George E. Brown Jr., the California Democrat who heads the House Space Committee, has decided it is time to shelve the next National Aeronautics and Space Administration super spectacle.

The project in question is what Ronald Reagan dubbed Space Station Freedom, which, over years of design revisions that made the orbiting platform ever smaller, came to be called "the incredible shrinking space station." If it should shrink out of sight in the fiscal 1996 budget, no one but the aerospace industry would suffer much, and space science might be a lot better off.

To understand the space effort whose apogee we celebrate in July, we must go back to the early 1950s, when the military-industrial complex was casting about for something lasting, lucrative, and spectacular to do with idle bomber and fighter assembly lines. The idea of space travel (dear to the hearts of sci-fi fans who had gone through the acne era reading Amazing Stories) was fostered in a series of articles in Collier's magazine that was later expanded into a lavishly illustrated book entitled Across the Space Frontier (Viking Press) in 1952. One of the authors was Wernher von Braun, the ex-Nazi V-2 engineer whom songsmith Tom Lehrer later lampooned as the person to whom "the widows and cripples of old London town/Owe their large pensions...."

Von Braun and his colleagues laid it all out with beautiful pictures--a multistage rocket with features that foreshadowed both the Satum-Apollo moon ship and today's Shuttle, and a space station surpassing Reagan's Freedom in both size and beauty, to which the spaceship would travel from Earth hauling goods and personnel.

President Eisenhower, no fan of foolish notions like man-in-space, allowed himself, in 1955, to be talked into announcing American plans for a few "small unmanned Earth satellites" as part of a U.S. contribution to the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1956-1957. Prescribing a nonmilitary role for this project, he handed it to the Navy, which perceiving it correctly as a "civilian" undertaking) gave it such low priority that it missed its IGY deadline altogether. Meanwhile, von Braun and his buddies...