Opinion In an earthbound era,heaven has to wait

Ending it,I suppose,makes good sense. Its benefits grew increasingly debatable,at least in relation to its cost: around $200 billion over four decades. Money is tight. What budget NASA still has might be better used in other ways.

But as the centrepiece of our country’s gaudily ambitious space adventures,the shuttle programme was a pre-eminent symbol of our belief that there were literally no limits to where we could go and no boundaries to what we could accomplish,so long as we hitched our ingenuity to our imagination and marshaled the requisite will. And there’s no real sense of what big dreams,if any,lie beyond Atlantis. The programme’s end carries the force of cruel metaphor,coming at a time when limits are all we talk about. When we have no stars in our eyes.

The current political debate and the nascent 2012 election season are utterly earthbound. Instead of the defiant trumpet blast that it’s morning in America — Ronald Reagan’s retort to the so-called malaise of the Jimmy Carter years — we have anxious promises to hold back the night.

“Let’s stop this American downward spiral,” Rick Perry,the Texas governor,told a conservative convention last month. Jon Huntsman,declaring his candidacy for the presidency,observed,“For the first time in history,we are passing down to the next generation a country that is less powerful,less compassionate,less competitive and less confident than the one we got.” Hard decisions had to be made,he added,in order “to avert disaster.” To some degree,such dire language reflects predictable political gamesmanship. By lamenting the status quo,candidates disparage its designated steward — in this case,President Obama.

The country has certainly survived more devastating and sustained periods of economic distress than the present one. But Americans right now are profoundly doubtful. For many,the fear isn’t just that there’s no imminent end to high unemployment and tepid economic growth,but that we’ve turned a fundamental corner and our best days really are behind us.

Just last week the Democratic pollster Mark J. Penn concluded that “the country is going through one of its longest sustained periods of unhappiness and pessimism ever.” And 39 per cent of the respondents in a recent New York Times/CBS News poll characterised that decline as permanent,at least in economic terms. It’s in this context that many Democrats and Republicans alike nurse a new isolationism,convinced that we can no longer afford broad engagement in the world. It’s in this context that immigrants,wanting pieces of a pie deemed more finite,are vilified.

And it’s in this context that hard-line conservatives cling to the notion of American exceptionalism. They can’t shut out what’s in their peripheral vision — economies in China,India and Brazil that are expanding much faster than ours — and doth protest too much.

In Washington and in state capitals,the squabbling is epic,and it’s focused not on what we might dare to build but on what we might manage to preserve. Despite the president’s exhortation that we chart the frontiers of innovation,there’s no grand mission that represents the kind of storehouse for our confidence and emblem of our can-do spirit that space exploration once did.

What has happened to our sense of discovery? I’m not sure,but I know what will happen to the spaceship Discovery,one of four remaining shuttles in the fleet. It’s bound for the Smithsonian,where we stockpile the glories of yesteryear. Frank Bruni