It’s been 48 years since May 25, 1961, when President John F. Kennedy, speaking before a joint session of Congress said, “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 safely to the earth.” It’s been nearly 38 years since Apollo 17, the last Moon landing. The US has accomplished a great deal in space since then. Nevertheless, many of us who watched live broadcasts of President Kennedy’s speech and Americans walking on the Moon, and were excited and inspired by those events, are disappointed that we haven’t gone further, much less back to the Moon. Are we 'lost in space,' perpetually going around in circles in orbit above the Earth?

There are many reasons why America shifted its priorities from putting people on the Moon and Mars to low earth-orbit missions and unmanned space exploration. Even before Apollo 17 Americans’ interest in the space program had begun to wane, and US government budget priorities had begun to change. By the early 1970s, Kennedy's 'new frontier' had been replaced by the realities of three assassinations, the Vietnam War, and all the social and political upheaval they brought with them. The last three Apollo missions were axed from NASA’s budget, and America's manned space program went back to the drawing board.

Redirecting NASA’s focus for human space flight had its logic. The costs, risks, and difficulty of sustaining human beings on the Moon or sending them to places like Mars are enormous. The technology wasn't there yet in any event; and we could learn and accomplish much by placing people in orbit while exploring Mars, other planets, and asteroids with robots. We’ve had spectacular success, such as the Mars Rover missions, doing just that.

It’s not that we’ve given up sending people back to the Moon and beyond it’s just that the time frame for doing so keeps moving further and further to the right. Back on July 20, 1989, the 20th anniversary of the first Moon landing, President H.W. Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative declared that Americans would return to the Moon and go on to Mars. On January 14, 2004, President George W. Bush, in his Vision for Space Exploration, directed NASA to focus on returning humans to the Moon by 2020, and eventually sending them to Mars and “worlds beyond.”

President Barack Obama, during the election campaign, said he was in favor of returning to the Moon. After he took office he appointed the Human Space Flight Plans Committee, headed by retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine, to make recommendations. Last week the committee told Obama administration officials that there's no realistic way to get Americans back on the Moon by 2020. Former astronaut Sally Ride, a member of the panel, said the gap between NASA's goals and its current budget totals roughly $50 billion.

When the space shuttle is retired in 2010 America won’t even have the capability to put people orbit until the Ares I rocket and the Orion crew capsule are ready in 2016 or later. Until then, American astronauts will have to hitch rides on Russian rockets. The Constellation program is intended to take astronauts back to the Moon, Mars, and near-earth asteroids sometime after 2030. The way things are going, we’ll be lucky to get astronauts to Mars during the second half of this century.

So what’s the rush? We’ll get there sooner or later. What difference does it make when we get to Mars and beyond? In the meantime we have pressing problems here on Earth. We have wars to fight, climate change to cope with, healthcare to reform, and economic crises to recover from. It will take at least a generation before we pay off our soaring national debt and can afford to go back to the Moon or to Mars. They haven’t changed in millions of years, and they’ll still be there when we get around to them. Then again, perhaps there are good reasons why we shouldn’t dally.

Throughout human history, every time we have expanded our frontiers we have reaped enormous benefits that were unforeseen at the outset. Modern humans walked out of Africa 100,000 years ago looking for simple things and discovered the world. Christopher Columbus went looking for trade routes to the Orient and discovered America. We've already seen enormous unforeseen benefits from the space program. When we eventually go to the Moon, Mars, and beyond we will be looking for microorganisms, water ice, and a better understanding of the origins of our universe. We certainly will discover much more.

Who knows, might we even prevent premature human extinction? There have been five mass extinctions on earth. The first occurred 450 million years ago after the evolution of the first land-based plants. The second came 350 million years ago. Two mass extinctions occurred during the Triassic period, between 250 and 200 million years ago. The fifth occurred 65 million years ago and ended the dinosaur’s dominance of the Earth. Sooner or later there will be another one. Whether or not human species survives may depend on how quickly we manage to establish self sustaining colonies on other planets and other solar systems. We know that will take a very long time. The sooner we get started the better. 

There is no shortage of people willing to risk their lives to do these things. Our only limitation is resources. As British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory said to a New York Times reporter when asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, people are eagerly willing to explore space “because it’s there.” All President Obama has to do is pull back $50 or $100 million from the failed $795 billion stimulus package, give it to NASA, and establish ambitious goals for returning to the Moon and going to Mars. Future generations will be enormously grateful to him if he makes that decision.