An era when we all knew where we were headed: space

There are any number of dates that could be seized upon to mark the beginning of the space era for the United States. But there is no denying that the first time an American went into space was exactly 50 years ago yesterday.

May 5, 1961, was a day when most Americans first got the notion that we might be catching up to our Cold War rivals, the Russians, who were the first to put a satellite into orbit, the first to put an animal into space and the first to put a man into space.

But on May 5, 1961, U.S. Astronaut Alan Shepard started to even the odds on the race to the moon when he climbed into his Freedom 7 space capsule and took a suborbital 15-minute flight into space.

The success of his mission was such that President John F. Kennedy was willing to predict just weeks later that the United States would send a mission to the moon and back before the end of the decade. And while Kennedy never got to see it, his successors, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, made good on his word. Neil Armstrong stepped out of the lunar lander and onto the surface of the moon July 21, 1969. Armstrong and his crew mates, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin, safely splashed down July 24.

The round trip lasted a week, but its roots traced directly back to Shepard’s 15 minute flight.

Not all the earliest astronauts got to go to the moon, but Shepard did. He was the fifth man to walk on the moon on Feb. 5, 1971, as commander of Apollo 14. He returned to work for NASA until 1974 and died July 21, 1998.

It was in many ways a less sophisticated age, an age when an impatient astronaut such as Shepard could radio the ground crew after a delay in the launch, “Let’s light this candle.”

There have been since Shepard’s day of triumph many others — and three days of particular tragedy that claimed the lives of three of Shepard’s fellow pioneer astronauts and 14 crew members on two shuttle missions.

A murky future

And there are serious questions today about the future of U.S. space travel and the nation’s commitment to space exploration, particularly at a time of budgetary worry that sometimes borders on panic.

But the nation should recognize that it was not a coincidence that some of our greatest technological advances grew out of the space program. And from that technology came much of our prosperity and much of our standing as a world leader.

Things learned in laboratories, on launch pads and in space had applications in defense, medicine, computer hardware and software, industry and almost every aspect of American life. More than that, there was the intangible effect, the inspiration that drove at least two generations to do the kind of things that had not long before been unthinkable. There is nothing today that inspires people — young and old — the way the success of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts inspired in the ’60s and ’70s.

A half century ago Shepard was willing to be shot into the unknown on the tip of a rocket. Americans today seem incapable of agreeing on anything that is worth working together toward or worth sacrificing for. The prospect that we have become a nation without a common vision is a lot more frightening than anything Alan Shepard and his colleagues faced.