Space Shuttle Columbia: Aiming High in '81

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Like the U.S., the space shuttle Columbia is looking up as the year begins

It was mighty considerate of NASA to roll out Columbia a full three months before it shoots into the future. Everyone needs a lift in January, and here, magically, comes this stark quartet of domes and turrets rising like a restored castle out of the Florida flats. The timing is impeccable. As the Reagan Administration lumbers into place, so too this other new machine—huge, untried, ambitious (albeit with limited maneuverability); designed to aid national defense, to boost Big Business, to restore U.S. eminence in a domain once its own; a reviver of old dreams; a boon to upward mobility. The same question applies to both vehicles: Will they fly?

In Columbia's case the question is a bit needling. A monument to Murphy's Law, the great white Batmobile that will be piloted by Astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen is already two years behind its timetable and $3.6 billion over budget. Only a year ago workmen had diagnosed the ship's ailment as "smallpox," a reference to the holes left in its outer shell when heat-dissipating tiles became unglued. At one time or another, the entire project became unglued. Perhaps it was prophetic that the task force proposing the space shuttle back in 1969 was headed by Vice President Spiro Agnew. In any case, Columbia offers in its fashion a symbol not only of the Reagan Administration, but of the U.S. as it rolls into the '80s—way behind schedule, well over budget, its hopes, as ever, riding on machines.

Yet the hopes are surprisingly and justifiably high. The economy is supposed to be on its last legs, but that would be hard to prove looking across the country as the country itself looks toward the new year. In Nashville a new museum will open in June, thus completing the $40 million James K. Polk Center for the Performing Arts. The National Aquarium in Baltimore, whose projected cost is $21.5 million, is scheduled to open on July 1. Los Angeles will focus its bicentennial celebrations on creating apartments and day care centers for the poor. Chicago, Minneapolis and New York City are teeming with construction sites. Orlando's international airport will add a new $3 million terminal; Louisiana will open a $700 million offshore oil port. So go the examples, which are plentiful. Pretty heady stuff for a nation that some contend has lost its self-assurance.

In fact, that self-assurance has simply been modified. American inventiveness, once the very source of its confidence, is certainly not what it was in the days when the country came up with the safety pin or the Ford. But reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. While West Germany and Japan have sent a competitive shiver into American industries in recent years, the U.S. has still managed to produce such things as the Xerox, the transistor, the laser and the microchip. A lot of Yankeeingenuity is spent, to be sure, on diverting gadgetry, such as a projected palm-size phone and a vacuum cleaner with a memory (a seemingly gratuitous burden). But recent developments in medicine, such as the hybridoma cells for cancer treatment and the creation of insulin through genetic engineering, are making the 1980s look boldly promising.