Coverage fails to slip surly bonds of Earth

The American media do two things extremely well:

They cover things that go boom -- wars of the kind now looming in Iraq and tragedies of the sort that overtook the space shuttle Columbia’s seven astronauts. They also chronicle consumerism -- who’s accumulating what, in what quantities and at what cost.

Beyond that, things get spotty and particularly so when the subject at hand involves ideas, processes, technical subjects, things that require an adult-length attention span.

Nowadays, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and its manned space program are on the spotty part of the media spectrum. In the 1960s, NASA was a prized assignment on quality newspapers and magazines and, particularly, on television.

Today, neither the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post nor the Wall Street Journal has a reporter assigned to cover the space program exclusively. All have made the topic one of those assigned to science or aerospace writers with many other responsibilities. Neither ABC, CBS nor NBC has a single correspondent whose responsibilities include covering NASA. CNN has a “space correspondent,” Miles O’Brien, but only one-tenth of his on-camera appearances over the last year have involved NASA. Fox, according to a spokesman, does not cover the space program on a regular basis.

The only news organizations with full-time space program reporters are the Houston Chronicle and the Orlando Sentinel, whose circulation areas include the Johnson and Kennedy space centers.

Partly, of course, this is because manned space flight in the form of the shuttle program -- while of incontestable value -- amounts in a certain sense to paddling around in the interplanetary shallows. Near-Earth exploration simply lacks the cachet of moon flights and expeditions to Mars.

Then there’s the money. In Tom Wolfe’s celebration of the Mercury astronauts, “The Right Stuff,” there is a scene in which the Edwards Air Force Base PR man explains to a table of skeptical test pilots what it is that really propels them aloft. “It’s funding,” he says. “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.”

Government spending also is what propels a lot of journalistic assignments, and on that count NASA is a minor player, getting smaller. The 3% increase assigned to the space agency in the $2.2-trillion budget President Bush proposed this week brings NASA’s total budget to only $15.5 billion. Of that, just $6.1 billion is earmarked for space flight.

No bucks, no stories about Buck Rogers.

To a certain extent, declining interest in the space program -- like our diminishing fascination with the Olympics -- is also another consequence of the Cold War’s end. Popular fascination with NASA ran highest when it was conducting “the space race” with the Soviet Union. The moon was the finish line, and once the U.S. crossed it first, the match was over in many minds. The era of U.S.-Russian cooperation that has ensued may be edifying -- and economical -- but, as a news story, it’s a bit of a bore. As it turns out, the Russians and their alarmingly ramshackle space program were more valuable as competitors than as collaborators.

Even at the apogee of its success, there were those who railed against the tendency of the space agency’s techno-apparatchiki to drain the most monumental moment of drama and significance. In a 1971 interview in connection with the publication of his remarkable account of Apollo 11’s lunar landing, “Of a Fire on the Moon,” author Norman Mailer mused that “NASA succeeded in making the most transcendental event of the 20th century boring.”

And the consequence?

Reached by phone at his Provincetown, Mass., home Tuesday, Mailer, now 80, was asked why he thought the manned space program had fallen so far off the national media’s radar over the intervening decades.

“My thoughts on the matter are so general as to be unhelpful and uninteresting,” Mailer replied. “I really haven’t thought about NASA since I wrote that book.”

In part, the indifference may stem from the fact that in the decades since Apollo 11, Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the lunar surface has had an unforeseen consequence: No one weighing its implications at that moment -- nor, for that matter anyone who had previously thought or fantasized about space exploration -- ever imagined that man one day would reach the moon, and then just stop going.

Speculative scientific thinking, like science fiction, had envisioned lunar colonies, sites of scientific exploration and mineral extraction, jumping-off points for new voyages of exploration farther and farther into the solar system.

It didn’t happen. It cost too much and there were no stories there.

Poised on the verge of infinity, man turned from the stars and looked homeward.

Some even date the birth of modern ecological consciousness to those first, unforgettable photographic images of the whole blue, cloud-strewn Earth that the Apollo astronauts carried back with them.

Astronaut and author Michael Collins, who piloted Apollo 11 while his comrades Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the moon, later recalled what it was like to look back at the Earth. “From space there is no hint of ruggedness to it,” he said, “smooth as a billiard ball, it seems delicately poised on its circular journey around the sun, and above all it seems fragile.... The difference between a blue-and-white planet and a black-and-brown one is delicate indeed.”

The sense that we share an all-too-finite planetary lifeboat adrift in an unimaginably vast cosmos, both bright and bleak, may have been the manned space program’s most widely shared achievement.

The years since have not simply been a dreary story of declining funding, but also of ever-contracting expectations, a continuing confrontation with our limits as a nation and as a species. Putting humans into deep space would cost more than any one nation could afford. The body’s reaction to weightlessness over prolonged periods appears to put the long voyages required by interplanetary travel out of reach. Moreover, it became clear that -- other than Mars or the asteroids -- there was no place else in the solar system where even the best-protected astronaut could survive.

The early 20th century’s great age of polar exploration made it clear that there was nowhere on earth that well-equipped and resolute men and women could not inhabit. The late 20th century’s great age of space exploration demonstrated that there were very few places out there anyone could go.

And thus, the vanguard of interplanetary exploration passed to the machines.

For most journalists, reporting on them -- no matter how valuable the science they do -- is about as alluring as writing about a big power lawnmower.

Is that a mistake? Probably. Something good reporting and good science have in common is a perseverance born of the realization that the one thing you never know for sure is what you don’t know.

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Times research librarian Scott Wilson contributed to this column.