Forty years ago Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on another celestial body. His words which are still some of the most recognizable even today were powerful and telling of a nation of people who saw hope and promise in a time of political and social unrest. I wasn’t alive then but I can imagine that many thought we would now be flying to and from the moon routinely by now.
But priorities and ideas change, as they are wont to do, and now forty years later we are no closer to a permanent lunar presence than we were the day Neil proclaimed his giant leap. Don’t get me wrong. We’ve done a thing or two in space since then. The Hubble Space Telescope, Skylab and the International Space Station are just a few of the amazing triumphs that the US has been a part of. But now, with our home under the threat of global warming and the depletion of fossil fuels, we are throttling down space exploration when we should be expanding.
CNN Reports that a proposal is on the table to scrap ISS in 2016 citing that we have to use Russian capsules to supply and transport crew to the station. This colossal international effort costing billions of dollars that isn’t even completed has already been given its death sentence. NASA funding is being slashed and many important programs including those intended to one day put man on Mars are struggling to survive.
A colleague and friend of mine recently had a discussion about the space exploration budget. He argued that the money was a waste and there were plenty of things here on Earth to spend that money on. Anyone who would argue against that point would have to have their head in the clouds. But to call it a waste seems pretty short sighted to me.
World renowned physicist Stephen Hawking says that space exploration is essential to the survival of the human race. I don’t know about you but I am not even as smart as Stephen Hawking’s shoe strings so I tend to give his opinion a little more weight.
Scrapping ISS seems like a bad idea to me for a number of reasons. Politically we would take a hit in the space race but the ISS is more than a 1up on other space faring nations. It’s a laboratory where countless experiments and scientific advances have been made. It could also serve as a good staging point for future missions to the Moon and Mars.
I find it hard to believe that NASA cannot come up with a rocket mounted capsule that is capable of docking with the ISS and delivering astronauts. It just seems silly to send a multi-billion dollar space station down in flames when it could be put to good use. We are talking about the United States government though, so why am I surprised?
The invention of the Space Shuttle, the collapse of the Soviet Union ending the Cold War and the changing political tides have all conspired to make US space exploration something less than shiny. While the space shuttle has done miracles for space experimentation, it probably set back out exploration program by thirty years. What used to capture the hearts and minds of the public was quickly munddane and boring when shuttle flights became routine.
What we really need to figure out is how to build a shipyard in space. Figure the logistics of simply getting raw materials into space so that manufacturing can happen there because we’ve reached the limits of what we can launch into space. Our next trip to the moon should be with a ship that is capable of making trips to the rock every few months instead of once and we’re done for four decades. There’s no possible way we’ve learned all we can about the moon with a bag full of sand and a handful of trips to the surface.
In my opinion, it’s long overdue that we take the next steps towards true exploration of space and go where no one has gone before, simply because we can.
‘Because we can’ has been the reasoning behind the space program since it’s inception. That alone should be reason enough in my mind but now we have real scientific and social reasons to do so. It is a relative certainty that the world we call home will one day become uninhabitable either through natural or man-made causes.
It is essential to the survival of the human race that we begin to colonize the rest of our solar system, be it on planets, moons or permanent space stations.
the hurdle of getting materials into space cheaply and quickly should be the chief concern at this point and I believe that there are some very good ideas out there. It’s time to aggressively pursue these ideas so that in another 40 years we aren’t looking back and wondering what we’ve done.
I was probably the friend semi quoted in your post. There is a cool factor with space. I understand that. It is cool. Astronomy and Physics and Astro-physics and astro-telemetry-gargoogletry is awesome. It’s sexy. I get that. However if you step out of the cool, and sexy. And you look at the problems that our planet is facing. I’m not a doomsday person. I don’t think I will see the end of the world, after all, George Bush doesn’t have any sons, so I think we’re good. But I do see a world headed down a nasty path. We have the money and technology to stray away from petroleum. Yet the powers that be seem hell bent on making as much money as they can with little regard to the repercussions.
I just think the money could be better spent elsewhere. If we had spent, what we spend on the space program, on eduction. Would someone have rose to the top to invent a new car the runs on clipped fingernails. Or something like that. We’ll never know, because we don’t put education first. We have people going hungry that shouldn’t. We have people on food stamps that get arrested with $2000 in their pocket. Is the money spent on the space program to blame for all of this? No. But an inefficient government is and IMHO, the space program is another example of an ineffecient use of money. Cool? Sure. Efficient, productive? No.
We need to stop polluting this planet, master the efficient use of natural resources or god forbid, renewable energy and proper disposal of the waste of that use. We need to educate the people and learn how to better share that education and teach the future youth. Until humanity grows up and learns to live in harmony on this planet and with this planet, we should stop looking for the next hunk of rock to rape.
I hear what you are saying man, but I don’t agree completely. Even if you take out the global warming threat you still have the threat of natural disasters like that which ended the reign of the dinosaur. I know you aren’t a doomsday person but we have near-miss encounters with rocks big enough to end all life on this planet of a regular enough basis that it needs to be on the radar screen.
There is no question we should take better care of our planet but even if we do and we turn things around, we are leaving a very real problem to our children and their children if we don’t begin thinking about solutions today.
Inefficient use of money? OMG! How you came on such non-sense? :D Amstrong stepping on the Moon was just the PR part of the project, each dollar USA spent on this endeavor was payed hundred times back. All those small bits that have been developed to get those guys up got into your normal life and brought just pure profit. Did you got a GoreTex jacket or shoes? Teflon pane at home? GPS in car? All those are the products of that big adventure with Apollo 11 and we would not have them otherwise. It is said that US space program was the best investment of the last century!
I couldn’t say it any better than Carl Sagan:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luAteAz3WQ0