Jul 21, 2017 4 min read

Editorial voices from newspapers around the United States:

In a speech at Kennedy Space Center recently, Vice President Mike Pence promised a return to the glory days of the U.S. space program. Quoting President Trump, the veep vowed that America would lead in exploration and discovery “like we’ve never led before.”

Considering the program’s storied history, those are extravagant expectations. But as President John F. Kennedy proved in 1961 when he challenged the U.S. to send a man to the moon before the end of the decade, ambitious goals can spur extraordinary accomplishments.

Making the space program great again, however, will take more than high hopes. It will take committed leadership from the Trump administration, a clear mission and sustained funding to achieve it.

In contrast to the Apollo era, America’s leadership in space this century has been hampered by mission drift. President George W. Bush decided in 2004 to retire space shuttles by the end of the decade so NASA could begin focusing on a return to the moon. President Barack Obama canceled the moon program and set the space agency on a new course for a rendezvous with an asteroid in the 2020s and flights to Mars in the 2030s. President Trump dropped the asteroid plan but maintained funding to continue developing a NASA rocket and capsule designed to carry astronauts into deep space.

America’s space program needs a mission that lasts beyond a single president’s term. There’s not enough time and money for a reboot every four or eight years.

Cliches sometimes apply, and in the case of maintaining our nation’s infrastructure, “Pay me now or pay me a whole lot more later” sums up the situation very well.

Crumbling infrastructure is a serious problem. Aging roads, bridges and schools present a public safety hazard. Inadequate water supplies pose real obstacles to the health and economic well-being of many communities.

Hidden community benefits like sewer and water systems can be a hard sell even in the best of times, but today’s political climate makes the prospect of approaching strapped taxpayers with costly projects even less palatable to government officials.

President Trump has called for an ambitious $1 trillion funding program to upgrade this country’s infrastructure. The president has proposed his infrastructure package be financed through both public and private funds. Given all the distractions that plague the Trump administration these days, we doubt such a plan will become a reality anytime soon.

Our best hope is that elected officials from the courthouse to the statehouse will do a better job of deciding which projects should go to the top of the list and how they will be paid for. And politicians must do a better job of making the case for these infrastructure improvements to taxpayers who feel they are already being asked to do too much.

There’s a heated debate in certain circles with potentially profound implications for the future of humanity – or, potentially, with as little import as those medieval considerations of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

It revolves around a core existential question: Are we alone in the universe? And its logical outgrowth: Should we step out of the shadows to find out by beaming signals into the cosmos.

A figure as notable as Stephen Hawking is convinced we’re not alone and has been warning against efforts to ramp up our interstellar calls, as it were, in hopes that E.T. will pick up the phone and answer. While it would be a singular moment in human history, the British cosmologist’s concern is that a civilization capable of detecting and responding to our existence might be millions or even billions of years more advanced. And his fear is that actions we take today might doom humans hundreds or even thousands of years in the future – assuming we survive that long – in encountering alien visitors who might view us the way we view bacteria.

It could be a benevolent E.T. But do we want to risk sending an electronic “yoo-hoo” to the Borg?