Ron: What’s happened to American science since Cassini launched

The Cassini satellite was launched into space by the United States 20 years ago. Today, it hurled itself into Saturn in an act of self-destruction.

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I hope you delighted in some of the over 450,000 photos that it sent back through millions of miles of space. In fact, Cassini was just shy of traveling 5 billion miles.

Remember when America cared about science? Remember when John F. Kennedy had the audacity to announced that we would land a man on the moon within a decade — and then we did it?

Yeah, that was cool.

It makes me sad because I was that nerdy kid building cardboard rockets and launching them into the sky with my big brother. About half the time I wouldn’t pack the plastic parachute correctly and it would just fall to the ground with a thud.

But sometimes, everything would go just right, and that rocket we got at the hobby shop would rise so high that I couldn’t see it anymore. I’d wait for the first signs of the parachute, then run. Chase it down and do it again.

I loved having presidents that dreamed of space travel. I know it’s a fools errand to take the budget of one government program and swap it in my mind to another. I can’t help but think that 20 years ago we were finding money in the budget to build an object that would eventually fly to Saturn and now we are fighting about how we budget to build a wall along our border with Mexico.

So to the scientists from 27 nations that joined us to collaborate on the amazing machine called Cassini, I salute you on behalf of all the nerdy kids around the world that you inspired.

As famed astro-physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”