EDITORIAL: Views From the Nation's Press
Jul. 23—The Philadelphia Inquirer on the cost of America's fickle fascination with space travel:
The popularity of every "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" spinoff imaginable on TV streaming services shows how much Americans remain intrigued by the possibility "to boldly go where no man has gone before." But 53 years after Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon, our excitement waxes and wanes with the ups and downs of real-world space exploration orchestrated by NASA. Consider a spate of recent news stories, which have alternately grabbed brief snatches of our attention or been mostly greeted by yawns.
Earlier this month, NASA released the first batch of images from the James Webb Space Telescope — photographs that widely impressed viewers (although there were more than a few who compared the latest views of these celestial bodies to upholstery swaths). The price tag for those photos? Close to $11 billion and counting.
Barely making the news was the June 28 launch of a spacecraft called CAPSTONE that was built by several NASA contractors and is operated by a private company, Advanced Space. After a four-month journey, CAPSTONE will orbit the moon for six months gathering information useful to future moon missions. The $30 million project reminds us that even with the private sector doing more and more of what NASA used to do on its own, space exploration still isn't cheap.
The Trump administration commanded NASA to return to the moon by 2024, but a number of funding and development delays have made that goal fluid. SpaceX, owned by Tesla founder Elon Musk, won the $2.9 billion contract to develop the Artemis lunar landing system that NASA hopes will put humans on the moon for the first time since 1972. The space agency has defended Artemis' cost, saying the lunar landers it built for the Apollo program would cost $23 billion each in today's dollars.
NASA contractors are also building separate units of a lunar space station that it's calling Gateway. It will have docking ports for visiting spacecraft and areas for crews to live and work. The space agency is paying Northrop Grumman $935 million to build Gateway's living area and Maxar $375 million to build its propulsion unit. However, some estimates say almost $4 billion may be spent on Gateway before the project is finished.
Whether that kind of money stays with NASA or is beamed to Musk's SpaceX or Jeff Bezos' Blue Horizon, taxpayers footing the bill should continue asking if manned space exploration is still too expensive. NASA has many missions in which the only human involvement is by long distance from Earth. Should it continue paying steep prices to send humans when expendable machines could travel for much less? In most cases, automated probes and other calibrated machines might do the job.
The moon has not been a manned space flight destination for 50 years because the expense of a return didn't seem worth it. Even now, renewed interest in the moon is based on using it as a base to send humans to Mars. The red planet has become the bauble dangled before Congress each year to entice NASA's budget approvals. Stretching its spending across more years doesn't mean space exploration would end. It might take more time, but as Einstein explained, time is relative.
The Miami Herald on Cruz couldn't watch as bloody Parkland images played in court:
During the sentencing trial of the confessed Parkland shooter, jurors and families have had to hear the blasts of rifle shots echo in the hallways of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. They listened to the recording of a boy moaning and pleading for help. Jurors intently watched video clips of Nikolas Cruz opening fire against a group of students who cowered in an alcove. They saw footage of athletic director Christopher Hixon crawl to safety after being wounded only to have Cruz catch up to him, raise his weapon and shoot him.
As the sound of heavy gunfire echoed in the Broward County courtroom, a family member pleaded from the audience, "Shut it off!"
And Cruz? He lowered his head. He looked down as that horrific video played. He didn't meet a witness's gaze as she glared in his direction while describing her injuries, the Sun Sentinel reported.
Was it shame, remorse, a tactic to gain sympathy from jurors who will decide whether he should be executed?
Who knows what's in the mind of the young man who pleaded guilty last year to killing 17 people, or how the perpetrators of such unthinkable, yet all-too-common, violence should react in court. Very few accused mass murderers stand trial as many are killed or commit suicide before they face justice.
The Cruz we saw in the courtroom last week is much different from the teenager in the video he recorded of himself three days before the massacre. Back then, he said he wanted to kill at least 20.
"You're all going to die. Pew pew pew. Ah yeah. Can't wait," he said in the video.
If it feels unfair that Cruz doesn't watch his actions while others will forever be scarred by what they saw and heard in that courtroom, it's because it is. It makes the retelling of those tragic moments even more painful and infuriating.
