Columbia space shuttle

There has not been, happily for some time, a political scandal big enough to warrant one of the networks giving us what they call 'gavel to gavel' television coverage of a Senate investigating committee.

In the spring of 1973, I suppose less work was done by office workers and housewives in America than at any time in memory because in May of that year a special committee, a Senate select committee on presidential campaign activities, opened public hearings and opened the barn door on the smell of Watergate. Day after day, they sat and we sat, from ten in the morning till five or six in the evening, while the Senate demonstrated its remarkable powers to call and question everybody in the republic with the exception of the president who claimed, as presidents always have claimed, the executive's privilege not to testify before the Congress. But in that instance, the president was the target of the investigation and what came out in these extraordinarily dramatic hearings was what, a year later, brought him down.

But if we haven't had a full-dress, morn-to-eve investigation to watch, that doesn't mean that they aren't at it. The main work of the Congress is done every day in the committees of the House and Senate and we don't go more than a day or two without seeing on the evening news an exchange or two between a member of the administration and an appropriate committee quizzing him to know why there should be a tax cut as high as ten per cent a year, why the administration proposes to ease the ban on smoky factory chimneys, why the farmers should be paid by the taxpayer for not growing wheat, so as to keep up the price, and a hundred other questions about the intentions and proposals of the Reagan administration.

Congress is the watchdog conceived by the founding fathers and, day in day out, it prods and snaps and growls and wants to know why.

A week or two ago, there was a Senate committee looking into the insoluble problem of having the government bail out an automobile company in order, after the next whopping loan, to prove the vitality of the free enterprise system in which, in the old days, them that showed a whopping loss went to the wall. One of the questioners was a long-faced man with a balding head and a sprinkling of grey hair who peered through gold-framed glasses and made a point or two and sat back and nobody paid him particular attention. He was, he is, Senator John Glenn of Ohio, now in his second term in the Senate.

What crossed my mind then, when the papers were beginning to fill us in on all the knotty details of the coming space shuttle flight was the unbelievable glamour, the dizzy fame of this man who on 20 February 1962 was the first American to circle the earth in orbit as all the world looked up in the sky and held its breath. Today, people, young and old, who can't remember the names of the men who walked on the moon, or for that matter the name of any other astronaut, remember John Glenn as the hero of the decade. Certainly, for a year or more after his space flight he couldn't go anywhere without being mobbed and cheered which, I imagine, gave him the idea in time to run for the Senate.

Well, as I say, he's now in his second term there and he is a respected member and he goes his way in peace. There are even college students who today can say, in all honesty, 'John who?'.

Well, watching along with scores of millions of other people last Tuesday afternoon, watching that shuttle, the first to look like a recognisable plane zing out of the deep sky first as a dot and then as a bird and then as a plane and hearing it snort triumphantly on the blinding sand of the Mojave desert, I wondered how durable the fame of John Young and Robert Crippen would be. It's perhaps churlish to ask this question in the moment of their glory and no answer is required or expected. It is enough now that, just when the United States was edgy and down and pondering the rise in crime in all the cities, we should have had the emotional booster shot of the Columbia.

To most of us, I suppose, the space programme, while it has languished for the past five or six years, has passed far beyond our comprehension. We take for granted now the beaming of a television report from far away by means of a satellite. We take it for granted, as I take for granted my voice coming into a living room simultaneously in Edinburgh and Melbourne and Mexico City without, for a second, understanding how it works.

We have not yet come to take for granted the feat of the Columbia. The papers and the telly have reams and reams of complicated information about how this miracle was accomplished but I find, and I'm sure that most of you do too, that a little of this goes a long way. For the moment we are agog with what we saw with our own eyes, that you can now send a machine off into space and you no longer junk it and watch the brave astronauts parachute into the Pacific. They come down in what they went up in and they taxi to a stop in the Mojave desert like any jumbo touching down at Kennedy or Heathrow.

The feeling, even to the most thoughtful Americans, has been expressed, I think, exactly by Hedrick Smith, one of the senior Washington correspondents of the New York Times. He wrote on Wednesday, 'To the millions of citizens who watched the space shuttle glide to its flawless landing, the newest space exploit was sweet vindication of American know-how. The automobile industry may be beset by Japanese competition and the military establishment may feel that Moscow has gained the advantage of momentum in the strategic arms race but the nifty, two-wheel touchdown in the Mojave desert provided a quick, jubilant lift for a nation that has been suffering from technological self-doubt.'

Well, that was written in the first glow of seeing the thing happen. Several days have gone by and I must say, as an old space watcher, I have to ask a vulgar question. It's the question the old inhabitant in the small town square put to his senator, home from Washington for the weekend, the senator who recited all the marvellous things the Senate had done in the session just over. 'Yes,' the old man said, 'but what have you done for me lately?'.

I have myself dutifully read columns and columns of barely comprehensible scientific stuff, mostly about how the feat was accomplished but when I was through, I felt like the English parson in the train with the young American going up to Oxford for the first time who said, looking over the little fields and copses, 'I guess you could fit the whole of England into one corner of Texas.' And the parson said, 'But to what end, young man?'

Well, to what end? I may be a little dense about the variety of by-products or what they now call spin-offs from Columbia's $11 billion mission but so far I gather we can be certain that the space shuttles, once they get going on their regular round trip, will make weather prediction more accurate which could help the farmers grow even more wheat to stack away and preserve their subsidy and they, the shuttles, will also feed into space floating scientific labs and more and more communications satellites. To communicate what?

Now, somebody predicted not only will we be able to pick up clearer and faster pictures of an earthquake in Iran, a golf tournament in Australia, a riot in Brixton, 'But,' the man said, 'we may soon, say, 20 years from now, be able to talk to other planets.' Which brings up, irresistibly, the remark of Ralph Waldo Emerson when the papers were bubbling with the news that a wonderful new invention, the telephone, had made it possible for Maine to talk to Florida. 'But what,' asked Emerson, 'has Maine to say to Florida?'

I'm pretty sure that the glow, the euphoria, the dizzy feelings of pride, the president's feeling that we all feel like giants again, will soon pass. It didn't take long for the pride in going to the moon to mock the vast frustration of the war in Vietnam. We won't need, and I should say are determined not to have, another war to make people grow cynical about the very feat they are now saluting.

The brilliant but enormously expensive trick in space only needles the depression in Detroit and the travail of the American automobile industry. Inflation is still roaring along, the murders of 25 black youngsters in Atlanta, Georgia remain unsolved. Handguns, too, were once a triumph of American technology but the fact of 50 million Americans owning them is not one which makes us feel like giants again.

It's already being recalled that the great sequence of the Apollo space mission has left in the end no permanent sense of well-being in the nation and a social scientist of some note has remarked that 'technology, as an answer for revitalising the American economy, is not going to be affected by the achievement of Columbia'.

I will end this rather sulky report and try to disabuse you of the idea that it's coming from a scientific ignoramus with the reminder of a sentence spoken by President Eisenhower when he heard of his successor's promise to put a man on the moon at the end of the decade of the 1960s. Ike said, 'Anybody who would spend $40 billion in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts.'

Last weekend, an old black man was watching a boxing match one night and the next day he was dead. He was an American whose fame, I should guess, will outlive that of the bravest space men. He was Joe Louis, called in his time the Brown Bomber, quite possibly the best boxer there has ever been and certainly the nicest man who ever put on the gloves. A natural gent of great dignity, he was once asked to pose eating a watermelon and so become, for the photographers, the usual darkie clown. He courteously said he didn't like watermelon. The puzzled referee said, 'Funny thing is, he likes it!'.

In all the dozen years as the world heavyweight champion until the day he died, nobody ever heard him boast or complain or say a mean word through awful tax troubles and, later, painful ill health. When he retired undefeated, an old American sports writer, now long gone, had the right epitaph for him:

'Joe Louis was', he wrote, 'a credit to his race. The human race, that is.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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