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The President's Message

By Steve Bartlett

A couple of months back, I recommended that Odyssey readers contact their elected officials to urge them to support a manned space mission somewhere. I didn't specify the destination because each of us has our own ideas of what the next goal in space should be and each of us should speak from our own conscience. At the time, there were rumors circulating that President Bush was considering making a major policy speech on space to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' flight and it seemed a good time for people to weigh in on where the U.S. should be going in space.

Not being content to talk about taking action, the OASIS board arranged to have a letter writing session after the December meeting for all of those present. We brought paper, pens, envelopes, and such so that no one would have an excuse for not writing. I put together a rough letter format before the meeting so that our communications would be brief and to the point. The template didn't specify what the destination should be: that was left to the letter writer. Then each of us was tasked to write to Bush, Vice President Cheney, Senators Boxer and Feinstein, and our own congressional representatives to urge them to support a human mission to our favorite celestial body. (Mine was the Moon.) In all, we wrote close to sixty letters that day.

Well, our letters and those of thousands of others around the country must have done some good because a few weeks later Bush came out with his "first the Moon, then to Mars" speech. While the plan wasn't perfect, it was probably the best that we could expect given the current economic climate.

But a speech alone does not a successful manned space program make, as the first President Bush learned back in 1989 when he made a similar proposal but failed to follow through with it. No, a successful program takes commitment, money, and public support. To drum up these three necessities, the members of the OASIS board put together a new set of letters for our elected officials supporting the basic program if the resources were garnered to carry it to completion. These letters went out around the end of January.

We also put together a press release for local media outlets endorsing the basic program, but only if it got sufficient funding. We sent approximately thirty copies of this press release to television and radio stations and local newspapers.

Only time will tell if our efforts are enough to do the job.