Reflections on NASA at 50: Ed Weiler

One of the greatest things that NASA pulled off in 50 years was being told by Pres. Kennedy that you've got seven or eight years to go from almost nothing to landing on the moon and actually pulling it off. That was just incredible.

On the science side, I remember when I first came to the agency the entire space astronomy program was one little satellite called International Ultraviolet Explorer. It was an 18-inch telescope that lasted for about 10 or 15 years, launched in about '78. NASA really deserves credit for starting the field of space astronomy. It didn't exist before NASA. Just in the time frame of 1978 to 1990 we went from that little 18-inch telescope to Hubble.

Hubble was obviously a great achievement, but perhaps an even greater achievement was finding it had a major problem and merging the human side and the robotic side together in really probably the most classic way it has ever been done. And turning Hubble from a national disaster -- people in the press called it a national disgrace -- into a great American come-back story.

Landing on Mars -- obviously Viking was a great achievement, the first landings on Mars -- then the two Mars rovers, both great successes.

I like to philosophize and I'm old enough now, almost 60, that I remember when I was growing up this country used to do things, used to build televisions that the world bought, it used to build cars that the world bought. It used to build airplanes. We don't do a lot anymore, but what we do do, we do real well. Nobody else can do it, like land on Mars. No other country can do that. No other country can launch a Hubble space telescope, fix it when it breaks. NASA really does things that no other country does and I think that's a point that is missed by a lot of people.

Another thing that's changed in 50 years is that things have gotten more expensive. A billion dollars doesn't go very far anymore, to quote a line. It really doesn't for a lot of reasons. One reason is that salaries for engineers aren't $10,000 a year anymore, they're $100,000.

Inflation's going up factors of five or 10, so money doesn't go as far as it used to. And things get more complicated. You're not going to excite the American people and American school kids by doing stuff that we did 30, 40 years ago in science.

I think the Vision for Space Exploration is an example of trying to move out of the rut we're in, going around and around the Earth. The analogy I like to use is we've got an SUV and all we do is drive around the Washington beltway.

It's time to go places because we are explorers by nature, by genetics. We'll go to the moon eventually, but from the science side we really look forward to going to Mars eventually with humans. Because I think if we're ever really going to find that rock with the fossils under it, it's going to be a biologist that turns that rock over because he's got the brain, or she's got the brain to do it. She knows which rock to turn over. I think that mission to Mars is going to be an international one by its very nature.

I'm also convinced that it will be this century, the 21 century ... that we will have the technology to build and launch a telescope -- perhaps humans will have to construct it in space because it's very large, that has the ability to search the atmospheres of other planets around other stars and to find those telltale traces of life around another planet: methane, carbon dioxide, the oxygen, the water vapor.

We find those elements in an atmosphere and we've proven that we are not alone. There's life out there. That only happens once in human history. Once. To answer that age-old question. That will have profound philosophical effects on the human race. And we will have that technology in this century ... so yeah, I think there's a future out there.

Ed Weiler is NASA's associate administrator for science. The views expressed are the author's alone and do not represent the official position of NASA or the Discovery Channel.

For more reflections on NASA's 50th anniversary, visit Discovery Space's NASA at 50 page and the When We Left Earth site's official NASA at 50 blog.

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