SAN ANGELO, Texas Recently my daughter, who lives in Houston, sent me a text message. She was excited about watching the NASA747 with a piggyback Space Shuttle Endeavour flying low over the city. After receiving her message, I thought about the end of human space flight, an era which began when I was young.

When I was 10 years old, I remember listening to a recording by President Kennedy. In his speech to Congress, he declared, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

The following year, I watched Neil Armstrong's arrival on the moon and when stepping onto the lunar surface, he uttered those famous words, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

After the Apollo program, the next steps were the space shuttle, space station, and finally the Constellation program. The Constellation program would have provided a safer and economical replacement for the space shuttle, while providing the capability to travel to the space station, the moon, and eventually to Mars.

Returning to the moon was an essential first step to test the new technologies and human endurance required for the two-year round trip to Mars. The Constellation program has been canceled and the shuttle retired.

The United States has been the leader in human space flight, yet we have decided to give up this role. If NASA wants to send an astronaut to the space station, it writes a check for $63 million to the Russian Space Agency.

The Chinese National Space Agency is planning for a space station, along with human space flight to the moon and mars. The Indian Space Research Organization is also planning for human space flight. Perhaps we will need to encourage our future scientists, engineers, and astronauts to travel to Russia, China or India if they want to participate in human space flight.

Admittedly, our country is facing difficult financial times. Yet the federal budget continues to increase while the NASA budget continues to shrink. The total NASA budget is less than one-half of 1 percent of the federal budget.

By comparison, just the interest on the national debt is 14 times the amount spent by NASA. The defense budget is 30 times the size of NASA's.

It is ironic that while the government is spending billions of dollars to encourage students to study science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM awards of $3.7 billion in 2010), companies supporting NASA are terminating thousands of engineers, scientists and high-technology professionals. What message are we sending to our students?

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RICHARD PLUM: U.S. space retreat cause for sadness, alarm