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Yes We Can

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Written by Mark Mayfield

A lot of parallels have been drawn recently between President-elect Barack Obama and President John F. Kennedy. Like Kennedy, Obama is a young man elected to the most important office in the world. Also like President and Mrs. Kennedy, the Obamas will be raising young children in the White House. No matter your political affiliation, you have to smile thinking about those two kids visiting their father in the Oval Office. It's a wonderful thing.

But I am hopeful there will be yet another similarity between Obama and Kennedy: The space program. Already during the course of the long presidential campaign, we have seen Obama adjust his policy on space to one that now supports NASA. Last summer he pledged $2 billion to help shorten the gap between the retirement of the space shuttle fleet and the flight readiness of NASA's next generation vehicles—Ares 1 and Orion.

Obama's pledge represented a stunning change of course from an earlier campaign speech in which he indicated that a huge education plan he was proposing would be paid for, in part, by delaying NASA's Constellation (Back to the Moon) program by five years. As the campaign progressed, however, and particularly as he courted Florida voters, Obama's position changed to one of support for NASA. And it didn't end there.

On September 22, Obama wrote a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid urging passage of a NASA request for an extended waiver that would allow the agency to purchase seats for U.S. astronauts on Russian Soyuz spacecraft during the coming space gap. Obama's request came during a time in which some U.S. politicians had expressed concern about the waiver extension following Russia's invasion of Georgia.

The extended waiver was added to another bill, approved by Congress and signed into law by President Bush on September 30. In a subsequent letter to Obama, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin thanked him for the support and said the waiver would not have been extended without it.

All of this appears to be a positive sign for NASA and the space program as Obama takes office next year. If you remember history, President Kennedy came into office with a very lackadaisical attitude on space. It was nowhere near the top of his agenda. But as we now know, he became a hero to the U.S. space program with his call for a Moon landing before the end of the 1960s.

Can Obama do something similar? It won't be easy, especially considering the economic meltdown our nation is in. But it may not be as far-fetched as it seems. In the December issue of LAUNCH Magazine, Walt Cunningham makes a compelling case that the U.S. had better pay attention to the Chinese space program or we may find ourselves behind in space. Now Walt is certainly no Obama supporter, and in fact he campaigned for John McCain in Florida this fall.

But Walt's assertion that the Chinese are bent on taking the lead in spaceflight in the not too distant future is most certainly something the Obama administration should take into account.

John Kennedy's bold challenge for Americans to land on the Moon was the result of an intense space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. , 'As Frank Borman has said, '˜Apollo was just another battle in the Cold War,'' Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders told me recently.

And if you study history, many of the advances in science and aviation have come about as part of great contests, or races. Lindbergh's 1927 flight across the Atlantic is an excellent example.

It's time for another bold move with the U.S. space program. The most charismatic president we have had since John Kennedy is about to take office. I hope that Barack Obama, a man who seems to possess a clear sense of history, will remember a time when American presidents committed our nation to great, bold moves that changed the world. Yes, we can do it again!

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