NASA: Oh, How We've Fallen

How low has dipped the inspiring rhetoric of the party of John Kennedy in terms of lofty goals and ideals?

Kennedy said in his speech to a Joint Session of Congress in May 1961:

“First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him back safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

This wasn’t all the starry-eyed idealism it appeared to us at the time. As reported by Marc Selverstone in “JFK and the Space Race” and based on the White House tapes from the Presidential Recordings Program, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Kennedy is quoted as saying In a Cabinet meeting in November of 1961:

“This is important for political reasons, international political reasons… Because otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money, because I’m not that interested in space. I think it’s good, I think we ought to know about it, we’re ready to spend reasonable amounts of money. But…we’ve spent fantastic expenditures, we’ve wrecked our budget on all these other domestic programs, and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in the pell-mell fashion is because we hope to beat them [the Soviets] and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed them. I think it would be a helluva thing for us.”

Now, according to President Obama, this is how it works – and this is supposed to inspire us? This is what the National Aeronautics and Space Administration does? Oh, sure, getting the kids to study a little harder in math and science, that would be nice. But apparently what is most important is making Muslim nations feel better about themselves – and their contributions to math and science. Um, what about *space*? Here’s the boss of NASA, retired Marine Major General and former astronaut Charles Bolden discussing his marching orders from President Obama:

“When I became the NASA administrator, [Obama] charged me with three things,” NASA head Charles Bolden said in a recent interview with the Middle Eastern news network al-Jazeera. “One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”

There’s a ghost of Kennedy in there, very faint. And he’s probably yelling in frustration at what we’ve evolved to. True, back in the day, building upon Persian and Chinese work, the region where Islam held sway under the Caliphate did make substantive contributions to basic human knowledge, and had universities of some note. And established some real centers of learning. For a while. Then, as Europe was struggling to move from the Medieval age to the Rennaissance and Enlightenment (arguably at least partially in response to pressure from Muslim expansion, ironically enough), the region ruled under the crescent moon was headed in the opposite direction, as noted by Bernard Lewis, a noted scholar of the middle east, in his book What Went Wrong:

And then, approximately from the end of the Middle Ages, there was a dramatic change. In Europe, the scientific movement advanced enormously in the era of the Renaissance, the Discoveries, the technological revolution, and the vast changes, both intellectual and material, that preceded, accompanied, and followed them. In the Muslim world, independent inquiry virtually came to an end, and science was for the most part reduced to the veneration of a corpus of arpproved knowledge. There were some practical innovations — thus, for example, incubators were invented in Egypt, vaccination against smallpox in Turkey. These were, however, not seen as belonging to the realm of science, but as practical devices, and we know of them primarily from Western travelers…

Another example of the widening gap may be seen in the fate of the great observatory built in Galata, in Istanbul, in 1577. This was due to the initiative of Taqi al-Din (ca. 1526-1585), a major figure in Muslim scientific history and the author of several books on astronomy, optics, and mechanical clocks. Born in Syria or Egypt (the sources differ), he studied in Cairo, and after a career as jurist and theologian he went to Istanbul, where in 1571 he was appointed munejjim-bash, astronomer (and astrologer) in chief to the Sultan Selim II. A few years later her persuaded the Sultan Murad III to allow him to build an observatory, comparable in its technical equipment and its specialist personnel with that of his celebrated contemporary, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. But there the comparison ends. Tycho Brahe’s observatory and the work accomplished in it opened the way to a vast new development of astronomical science. Taqi al-Din’s observatory was razed to the ground by a squad of Janissaries, by order of the sultan, on the recommendation of Chief Mufti.

Not to put too fine a point on it – if the Muslim world feels bad about how they’ve fared in the sciences and math since the fall of the Caliphate – they have only to look in the mirror to see the source of the problem. They walked away from it. In some cases, under the direction of the Imams, they ran away from it. Which is why most of their best scientists are educated in US, European, Russian, Indian or Chinese universities, their huge oil-funded mega-building projects are largely designed and built under the supervision of foreign or foreign-trained architects and engineers. But they can recite the Koran, flawlessly, because they have lots of schools that teach that. Well, if you’re male anyway. There can be some troubles with all of that if you’re female, depending on who holds sway where.

As for NASA conducting sensing sessions with the Muslim world – I think I would much rather they stick to their knitting, and that the President would put as much effort into inspiring Americans to get to work and forge ahead and keep moving forward, than to spend that rhetoric on comforting other nations about their past. On the other hand, perhaps it will clear the way for private enterprise to at least take over dealing with near-earth space, and the opportunities inherent there.