From Star Trek to real space exploration (Remember space exploration? It’s something we used to do when I was younger, and we believed in ourselves.)…
Listen to the voice of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explaining what we have lost with our retreat from space. I found this at a site called “geeksugar.”
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Let’s explore space using unmanned vehicles. Sending men into space is just an enormous waste of money.
As a big space buff, I hate to admit that I don’t believe manned space exploration has much merit until we can develop far better propulsion systems.
@ bud & Tim – we’ve actually done quite a bit of unmanned exploration. The Voyager programs were a huge success. Cassini and Juno are still actively working or travelling. There’s dozens of other probes out there working.
The Shuttle program turned out to be a waste – the cost per lb to orbit never came near the projections. Astronauts basically were reduced to being truck drivers. Now that private industry is ready to tackle the low earth orbit cargo launches (at a lower cost than NASA) it should free the space agency up for something more far reaching.
The real shame is that we didn’t immediately build on the successes of the Apollo program. We had the skilled scientists and engineers mobilized, we had effective managers, trained astronauts, solid budgets, production lines set up to build massive rockets & capsules. Our universities were positioned to turn out a large number of aerospace engineers. Now pretty much everyone who worked on Apollo is likely to be retired or nearing retirement. It’s a shame that we let that slip. As soon as going to the moon became feasible, we should have set our sights on Mars.
I didn’t stop dreaming, but I try to stay in the realm of the terrestrial…
While I think funding for NASA is an important part of federal spending, I think that if we’re going to spend billions on manned space exploration, it had better be for solid scientific reasons, things that cannot be done as well or better by unmanned missions. Doing it for romantic/patriotic reasons is, as Mr. Spock would say, “illogical.”
And the fact remains that “exploration” of deep space in the form of study, unmanned probes, etc., IS continuing and America IS a leader in this regard. Not that these charts are the final word, but a glance at the latest US News & World Report ranking of the world’s best universities in physics and astronomy reveals that six of the top nine institutions are American, 11 out of the top 20.
To value the superficial over the substantive is, granted, one of American society’s defining characteristics in this day and age, but in evaluating the merits of space funding we must truly apply the scientific method and avoid sentiment and emotion in making our decisions.
bud – who’s going to conduct experiments at the space station? Something equivalent to the Mars Rover?
Phillip, we thank you for your most logical response.
But dammit, Jim, I want to go to Mars!
Seriously, what do you think of the narrator’s point about all the ways our perspective toward Planet Earth changed after we had seen it whole for the first time in its 4 billion-year history?
I think he may have taken it a BIT far — I suspect some of those things might have happened without Apollo 8 — but it’s interesting.
And I don’t think machines sending back such images does the trick. Hey, with CGI we’ve got machines now that can create that view, or any other one you can imagine, and do it in HD video and make it look better than life…
I don’t think there’s a substitute for humans being there, in terms of enlarging the collective perspective of our species…
DeGrasse Tyson took the subtitle of my abandoned thesis. The Discovery of Planet Earth.
I agree that the seeing the images of earth from the moon may someday be looked back upon as having been the beginning…just the very beginning…of changing the way humans thought about the planet, surmounting concerns about nations, races, tribes, etc.
But it sure doesn’t seem that way now does it? (I’ve always said the only thing that will REALLY end nationalism and all that other stuff, will be the arrival on earth of alien life forms, whether benevolent or not.)
Even if you buy the linkage Tyson makes between the environmental legislation and those images of the earth (which I don’t completely accept), well, we have the pictures now. We can take pictures of earth from farther away, I suppose, to show our fragility even more dramatically. But are a couple of people going to Mars, or some more humans returning to the Moon, really going to change thinking on Earth? We already understand or should understand that we all hold the planet in common, understand our species’ relative fragility and johnny-come-lateliness in the big scheme of life on earth, and the absurdity of dividing ourselves based on nationality, or religious belief, or relative wealth, or any other arbitrary categories that will seem absurd to those aliens when they do finally get here.
If we can’t understand those things now I don’t think moon trips or Mars trips are necessarily going to help. Then again, if more countries send men into space other than just the US or Russia as in the past, the message of our species’ tiny-ness and insignificance in the cosmos may spread more widely amidst the world population. That could be a good thing.
Has the ISS done anything that Skylab or Mir didn’t already do? I mean, besides not crash back to earth?
Space should be the “final frontier”. After we’ve conquered hunger, disease, literacy, energy, and clean water. After we’ve got those problems solved, I’m fine with spending billions to see if we can drive a dune buggy on the moon.
Right, our perspective toward planet Earth changed so much we stopped over-populating it, burning a hole in the ozone layer, etc. After all, if we can get to the moon, and Captain Kirk went to all those human habitable planets with hot English-speaking babes wearing false eyelashes, why not?
Absolutely!
I mean, let’s look at this scientifically and objectively and logically, to please ol’ Spock over there…
If the Enterprise encountered those hot, scantily-clad, English-speaking babes in faraway star systems (a fact established well over 40 Earth years ago), then it stands to reason that there is a MUCH greater probability of equally hot babes — probably wearing shiny, form-fitting Mylar-like space suits, of which the bottom part consists of Daisy Duke shorts — on Mars.
How can Man pass that up?
But then there’s the Reavers….
well since Kathryn brought up the Reivers, I think Brad and I can agree that we hope that Joss Whedon’s spectacular success with Avengers means that he can write his own ticket in Hollywood and get an artistically-rewarding-but-financially-more-dubious project green-lit. Such as a resumption of the Firefly series, or a sequel to Serenity.
If I won the lottery (powerball or megamillions or whatnot), I’d buy the rights and resume production of Firefly. I’m kind of suprised that some Silicon Valley billionaire type hasn’t already done it.
Sadly, politicians in those states where NASA has facilities supporting manned spaceflight, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama, view NASA as a “jobs program” for their state. Equally depressing is that other politicians don’t support NASA.
NASA is America’s Space Program. I am proud as heck with what they do and ashamed of the treatment that they get in Washington from funding.
It seems amazing that while the Vietnam war was in progress, the US and Russia were in the planning stage for a joint US/Russia space mission, the Apollo/Soyuz Test Project.
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4209/toc.htm
I read in Florida Today that legislation has been introduced for NASA to pick the competition and pick a single commercial vendor to supply and transport astronauts to the Space Station.
Ray Bradbury had this to say about NASA, June 5, 2012:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/history/features/bradbury.html