The Pecan Park Eagle

Our son Neal McCurdy (far left in green) celebrates a 7th birthday party trip with his buddies to the Space Center at NASA back in 1991.

Is “Space City” now totally dead as Houston’s base identity with NASA? For that matter, is NASA itself dead? Will the cancellation of further manned space fights simply cause NASA to fade further into the background as just another government program we pay for with our taxes without really understanding why?

Who among us from that day will ever forget the Russian Sputnik firing into space orbit in 1957 that suddenly shocked us into realization that we were dead in the water behind our then presumptuous arch-enemy, the Soviet Union? As I remember from my sophomore year at UH, it shocked the bejabbers out of us and almost singlehandedly pointed many of my collegiate contemporaries into engineering and the physical sciences. It was the way to go.

Then along came President John F. Kennedy’s announcement at Rice Stadium here in Houston on September 12, 1962 that the new NASA center in Houston was now aiming to put a man on the moon, Who among us can ever forget the memorable punchline of JFK’s speech:

“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Doing the right thing (at least, on the public level) became the salvo and working ethos of my generation: You do what needs to be done because it is the right thing to do, and the right thing to do is always uphill harder than downhill and easy. We weren’t aware at the time that the man who modeled these values for us also lived a private life in which hard personal outcomes were secretly achieved in the easiest ways known to mankind since the beginning of time.

The public candle that lit for us was NASA. In Houston, we celebrated our new role as the headquarters for NASA and the Manned Space Program by grabbing the title of Space City, USA and even naming our biggest, hottest, one-of-its-kind-for-a-while sports venue and renaming our relatively new big league baseball team as the Astrodome and Astros.

On July 20, 1969, we did it. We beat the Russians to the moon, with “Houston” being spoken as the first word ever expressed on the moon:

“Houston, Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed.”

American astronaut then Neil Armstrong immortalized the first foot print of man upon any extra-Earth, celestial body with this expression:

“That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.”

Now, forty-three years later, it all seems all but over. With President Obama’s cancellation of further manned space flights, what is the role of NASA in our future?

When some brief discussion was given recently to the possibility of changing the nickname of the Houston Astros as they go into the American League in 2013 due to the fact that our identity as “Space City” is now dead, but I will still beg to ask the question:

Is Space City now dead as a future identity for the City of Houston? Has it simply been killed by a president who already writes off Houston and Texas as a place where he can expect to get votes in his own political life? For that matter, is the idea of future American manned space flight now dead because one president decided to kill it? Are American astronauts now only going into space as Russian hitch hikers or corporate flight contractors?

Look at all we now have and use daily as a direct or peripheral result of NASA: Everything from satellite communication, micro chips, weather forecasting, GPS, the Internet, certain foods and medicines, microwaves, I can’t even name them all – but all of them came from a program that our city once proudly supported as Space City, USA – and none of these things were around when JFK made his famous speech at Rice in 1962.

Quo Vadis, NASA? The American people must now answer that question for you.