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Top 10 Reasons for a Space Program
Its_My_Hair writes "Space.com has an article on the top ten reasons for a space program. Most of the reasons seem to say that our space programs are here for our safety." The only necessary reason is "because it's there".
The space program really does need some very visable goals. How about a manned Mars mission by 2015?
None of the reasons given imply that we need a human presence in space. As long as we have to use huge, contained explosions to move things off of the planet there is little reason to put humans in space.
They also forgot the 11th reason. NASA is a government agency, and government agencies must find reasons to exist and grow their budgets.
I've always wondered that if there were some crew memember aboard the ISS and something catastrophic happened to Earth how long could they survive? I know people on Mir survieve for over a year but I have no idea how often Mir was restocked.
However generally I agree that if we do want to survive long term (and we don't destory ourselves) then we will outgrow this planet or strip it bare forcing a move.
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Will benifits of space and hopefully increased maturity help out the human race
:)
Nah, we'll just carry our bad habits out into space. A little bit of zero gravity won't take the "trailer park" out of us.
I think the makers of StarCraft had a good idea of how human spacefarers would look and act.
Is it likely that if an impending catastrophic meteor collision were to be discovered, the general public would even be made aware?
I've heard people say the US government would not let its people know they were going to die. But I imagine that if an astronomer discovered something like this, they would request verification from astronomers around the world who would then be in the know. And I doubt the word wouldn't leak out somehow.
Does anyone know what the government's policy towards this might be, and whether or not they could adequately silence such information?
NASA/ESA are just no longer the right guys to take manned space exploration forward. The Shuttle fiasco proves just how bad NASA is at delivering affordable spce travel. Generate incentives (X-Prize style) and let entreprenuers build the re-usable ships that could fly large numbers of people into space..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
OK, I admit it - I like the coolness of NASA. I disagree with the article - most of those "top 10" are not in NASA's mission - but maybe it's just because NASA is a good service provider to those who do have strong, even noble missions.
I do believe that there is a good need to fund the science and engineering of areospace technologies - and the people at NASA are certainly the right people to do it.
And I'm certainly not totally against the manned space program. And being American, I think the US should invest heavily into the technology and trade where it still has clear leadership (because we all here see where industries like manufacturing and IT have/are going).
But alas, NASA needs to do more to both commercialize the business aspects of space, and to invest towards useful goals - too often I think that the billions in contracts could be better invested.
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We couldn't do anything anyway... it's more than likely we wouldn't even see an asteroid until it was pretty close to us, by which time it'd need a huge change in trajectory to make it miss us... we just don't have the technology to do that.
All of this isn't an argument for a space program, just more scientific research into how to deal with the threat (tractor beams would be damn cool.. I just doubt their possibility somehow).
(Anyway last I heard there were only about a dozen people paid to track asteroids... it's not as if it's being taken seriously).
However, the infrastructure, including TVs, classrooms, etc... is not always there, so you do have a point. Better building the schools first :) but where they do exist, you can leverage satellite technologies.
Do not forget that most development contracts go to US suppliers. So USAID give a load of money to a project, but most of it goes back to US companies for their satellite time, TVs, cameras, lighting, mixing desks... whereas building projects cannot always pass muster with the guidelines that budgets should be granted, where possible, to US based companies. Maybe that policy isn't so wrong, because just giving money to local companies often results in graft and lack of accountability.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
...is that, chances are, these technologies will be developed anyway, and they will be developed to solve the problem directly at hand, thus making the research effort cheaper and the results better.
I mean, so space exploration is going to solve the education problems in the third world? Are farmer boys from africa going to sit at a videoconference lecture held by a professor from Harvard? Give me a break.
I have no problems with space exploration, but why is it that when it comes to space, there is always a lot of blind dreaming going on?
Just because space is more entertaining than say, cancer research, it doesn't make it more important.
And by the way, we have plenty of time for space exploration before the odd meteor hits or the sun explodes..
Will code a sig generator for food
I hate to say it againg but it is money, not goals. I just don't understand why the goverment doesn't spend more on space exporation. Every dollar pays off 10-20 times on economic growth.
If every branch of the goverment paid of like that, we wouldn't have any problems.
-Richard
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
"a race as messed up as ours"
And your bar for comparison is what?
Maybe we are the most enlightened race in the universe, who still struggle endlessly for good despite our tendencies towards violence, greed, deceit.
Maybe every other race in space has given up the ghost and socially accepted their darker tendencies. Maybe we could be the torch of hope in a morally bankrupt universe.
Scary huh?
- geological survey data - ever thought of selling that landslide probability data for California to the house insurance companies?
- Water temperature and conditions data - ever thought of selling this to fishermen?
- So on so fourth.
The problem with selling them is that there is always at least one more party to have access to these (start with your own gov and continue with russians, europeans, chinese, etc). There is no monopoly and you have to rely on value added services to make this profitable. Corps do not like this in an emerging market. No VC will invest in a concept for which they know that it will not have the market to its own for at least a few years.Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
...or something bigger than us, to simultaneously keep us grounded in something like reality and to enbiggen our spirits.
I can't prove this, this belief might be the result of decades of science fiction reading and a biased reading of the history of the Middle Kingdom, but cultures that interact with forces that don't care about their beliefs seem preferable to me to ones that believe they have it all figured-out and have all they need right there. Space, although its manned exploration will inevitably be a social affair, is not the sort of place that will forgive strong deviations from knowing where you are and what things are like. The feedback loop works better with some connection to a non--socially-constructed reality.
In the other direction, that of societies that are too interesting, I'm afraid that a society without an actual Outside will find its replacement in internal divisions, that without a Grand Project we'll end up in petty bickering (think of the value of unsuccessful escape plans to the P.O.W.s who are kept busy by them, and believe that they're putting one over on their jailers). As long as we can honestly say, "If we can put a Man on the Moon, why can't we....?" we'll have broader horizons than if the immediate retort is, "No we can't."
Of course, maybe I just want all the he-men and strong-chinned monosyllabically-named inventor-heroes to clear off for months at a time (and die in larger numbers) so that more {Robert Crumb}-like men like me can have their women.
Finally, here's some "Lear" on the subject of the importance of non-necessities, at least as a bitter, spoilt, old, men sees it:
O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life's as cheap as beast's: thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm.
It looks like they missed one of the most important reasons: energy.
ppl should check out www.hubbertpeak.com
Energy is a BIG problem and the population presently doesn't really grap the issues. Already we have had the 2nd oil war. If anyone doubts this then perhaps a correlation between reserves per captita in Britain and the USA should be done against the reserves in the middle east. Doing same might explain some things.
In my mind - there is zero doubt we need to go nuclear and we need to start now. Yet the biggest nuclear plant in the solar system is the sun and the best way to harness it is from space. So, IMHO space exploration and technology can be used to offset the need for nuclear plants on earth.
Yup - we need nuclear but I prefer to have the plant about 93 million miles from my house and that IMHO is a pretty good reason for a space program.
There is a really good book written by T.A. Heppenheimer that explains this (Colonies in Space). Perhaps with the Chinese planning on a station on the moon the western world will wake up and stop spending their time "administering" and "managing" and start spending more time "doing".
This is the same group of people which applaud China's attempt for manned space missions. Then, the same people criticize the US and NASA for doing it.
A little bit hypocritical? I'd say so!
Then again, you don't see private-industry initiatives going on much of ANYPLACE other than the U.S.A. Most of the world functions on socialist-leaning "crony capitalism" anyway, and thus exhibit the same bureaucratic mindset we've come to expect from NASA.
Governments don't do frontiers very well. The best they can do is hand you a pick, shovel and a mule team and get the h*ll out of your way.
And don't give me "Isabella and Chris Columbus." European absolute monarchies of that time were the equivalent of modern corporations, out first to make money for the crown. Sure helps if you have Dieu et Mon Droit on your side, and don't have to bother with standing for election.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Privitasation is all well and good, but structure (read: metaphor) have always receded humans ventures into any new realm. Without metaphor, we have no basis to understand the new experience.
The exploration of space does involve every person, even those who think it doesn't need to be explored or developed, since it involves the understanding of a new area of the human experience.
If nothing else, modern government should/will be inherently edgy of simply letting corporatons run free into space development. Many of the freedoms and social enlightenment that we've come to know in the last 300 year is fairly recent - to let private corporations run free in space would be akin to 'going backward' because historical precedence would give corps. sovereign control over what they stake claim to (under salvage and high seas 'laws'). Not exactly a step forward.
Cultural Property laws will take the lead here - once we develop them further! Those who want to move humans into space will have to be more broad-sighted than these posts let on.
-shpoffo
Extinction doesn't happen in a vacuum; it happens when the environment changes to the point that existing species can't adapt. Humans are really remarkably good at adaptation
:).
Granted, however, we are also remarkably good at changing the environment at an alarming rate. We are adaptable, but we obviously have not adapted. That is why there are so many overweight people. We are still hard-wired to like fat and sugar, because it was a very efficient means of energy consumption when we did not have a McDonalds on every corner. Evolution is not keeping up with our technological and social advances (memolution?)...
We can't adapt fast enough, so we will die out (or become cyborgs
I wonder if we create machines that survive while we die, would that count as machines evolving from us?
Actually, they can't do this. Cause the companies that can afford and have the technology to exploit space are large companies. These companies have acquired their knowledge through government (military) contracts. Because of this the U.S. government forbids them to do certain things, ie export satellite and rocket launch technology to foreign contries. Because what is used to send a satellite into space can be refined and used to drop a bomb back down.
I think you all remember the big hoopla awhile back where a US satellite company was reprimanded for sharing rocket info with the Chinese. Essentially they left their satellite and last stage components in Chinese warehouses and the Chinese took it apart and rebuilt it.. thereby learning its secrets. And the company did this because their satellites were exploding during last state seperation on Chinese rockets. This led the ban of US companies launching satellites on Chinese Rockets. And the the new practice of not shipping satellites until right before launch.