Final Discovery flight is nothing to celebrate

Photo of Charles Krauthammer
Space Shuttle Discovery, mounted on the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, flies over the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday..





Is there a better symbol of willed American decline? The pity is not Discovery's retirement but that it died without a successor. The planned follow-on — the Constellation rocket-capsule program to take humans back into orbit and from there to the moon — was suddenly canceled in 2010. And with that, control of manned spaceflight was gratuitously ceded to Russia and China.



If we're talking jobs and growth, science and technology, R&D and innovation — what President Barack Obama insists are the keys to “an economy built to last” — why on earth cancel an incomparably sophisticated, uniquely American technological enterprise?


Well, you say, we can't afford all that in a time of massive deficits.

There are always excuses for putting off strenuous national endeavors: deficits, joblessness, poverty, whatever. But they shall always be with us. We've had exactly five balanced budgets since Alan Shepard rode Freedom 7 in 1961.



NASA will tell you that it's got a new program to go way beyond low-Earth orbit and, as per Obama's instructions, land on an asteroid by the mid-2020s. Considering that Constellation did not even last five years between birth and cancellation, don't hold your breath for the asteroid landing.

Nor for the private sector to get us back into orbit, as Obama assumes it will. Neil Armstrong, James Lovell and Gene Cernan are deeply skeptical. In a 2010 open letter, they called Obama's cancellation of Constellation a “devastating” decision that “destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.”

Which is why museum visits to the embalmed Discovery will be sad indeed. America rarely retreats from a new frontier. Yet today we can't even do what John Glenn did in 1962, let alone fly a circa-1980 shuttle.

At least Discovery won't suffer the fate of the Temeraire, the British warship tenderly rendered in Turner's famous painting “The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth To Be Broken Up, 1838.” Too beautiful for the scrapheap, Discovery will lie intact, a magnificent and melancholy rebuke to constricted horizons.