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Remembering NASA Disasters With an Eye Toward the Future
mattnyc99 writes "This next week marks the anniversary of three sad days in NASA's history: three astronauts died in a capsule fire testing for Apollo 1 exactly 42 years ago today, then the Challenger went down 23 years ago tomorrow, followed by the Columbia disaster six years ago this Super Bowl Sunday. Amidst all this sadness, though, too many average Americans take our space program for granted. Amidst reconsiderations of NASA priorities from the Obama camp as the Shuttle nears retirement, then, the brilliant writer Chris Jones offers a great first-hand account in the new issue of Esquire — an impassioned argument against the impending end of our manned space program. In which camp do you fall: mourner or rocketeer?"
Launch them in pairs. One is bound to get up there.
... is a bad month to be an astronaut.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
I thought they took Jack Thompson's licence to practice law... http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/03/23/
Ok, so we've lost a few people in space exploration. You know what, that's what happens, that's what they signed up for, and... that's healthy. What's not healty is how oversensitive the Public seems to be to these losses. Yes, the shuttle is aging, yes we need a new syste, but we shouldn't abandon manned space flight. Without manned space flight, how will we ever escape the Earth? And sooner or later, the Earth is going to want to be rid of us. Or the sun will, and Earth won't have much choice in the matter.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
Coincidently I've been watchin' the "When We Left Earth" DVD's recently. One of the astronauts that discussed the Columbia accident said that they know the risk and do it anyway.
How many more people have died in the Iraq conflict than the entire history of the space program? It's pretty twisted that the majority have done comparatively little to end that, but are ready to grab their pitch forks and torches when it comes to the space program.
No sig for you!!
Those little Mars rovers seem to be going strong. Lets put our money where it seems to be providing the best ROI.
Have gnu, will travel.
Get my drift folks? Astronauts do not become Astronauts because they want a safe job. If I were capable, I'd risk my life to be in Space.
Considering the greatest impact manned space travel has had on my life is probably freeze dried fruit in my morning cereal, that's a pretty lousy cost-to-benefit ratio. Until there's something better than a rocket for propulsion, I don't think manned space flight makes sense. However, the rovers and robots are definitely worth it. I think it makes a whole more sense than trying to shoot people into space.
NASA should stick to what it's so good at doing: sending robots into space.
We meat bags should stay on Earth where we belong.
This. I work in space science, think manned spaceflight is a wonderful thing, and look forward to it becoming increasingly a commercially available thing... but it's an extremely expensive way to accomplish most tasks, especially when it comes to accomplishing anything in the way of science.
I also work around environmental policy, and strongly feel we'd be better off working on surviving on this planet, instead of ruining it, then going off looking for others to ruin. Put a few of those "best and brightest" brains to work on finding ways to meet the Millennium Development Goals, wouldja?
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
With Obama's plans to have the Federal Budget fully searchable a la Google, can't I just specify where I would like my tax dollars to be apportioned to?
All of it should go to NASA please...
I mean, it's great, but ultimately we will have to be sending people up there anyway. There is no way around it.
We HAVE TO improve the technology for lifting people from this rock. Until such day as we can make a machine that is as individually intelligent, dexterous, decisive, and bold as a human being, we have no real alternative.
And even if we do make such a machine, it would not necessarily be a good day.
Don't fly around January-February.
Pardon my cynicism, but what the hell does the super bowl have to do with anything?
If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel, I'd be richcursive!
4 8 15 16 23 42
Freeze-dried fruit? Hah. How about titanium tools and magnesium suitcases? Do you use any drill bits or blades with titanium or nitride cutters?
Materials science is just one area that has been improved dramatically by the space program.
Do you use anything with teflon in it? Wait... let me rephrase that: do you use much of anything that does NOT have teflon in it? As a coating or a slider or a bearing...
This is barely the tip of the iceberg. If you think all the space program has brought you is freeze-dried fruit, then I respectfully suggest you pick up a book now and then and look into it a bit more deeply.
Personally, I think they've been far too cautious. "As of 2007, in-flight accidents have killed 19 astronauts, training accidents have claimed 11 astronauts, and launchpad accidents have killed at least 71 ground personnel. About two percent of the manned launch/reentry attempts have killed their crew, with Soyuz and the Shuttle having almost the same death percentage rates... About five percent of the people that have been launched have died doing so..." Surprisingly enough, Soviet and American casualties are about the same. These people knew the risks they were taken; being the first to try out a new technology is always a risky proposition. Compared to human costs of building bridges, testing aircraft, even driving race cars, 101 deaths is a really small number. Heck, I'm willing to bet more people have died playing football than working for NASA -- yet nobody accuses football coaches of not being cautious enough. (That is, a higher number of total deaths, not a higher percentage.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Shed not a single tear for one who has lived the Dream.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The problem isn't that space exploration is dangerous - everyone knows that. The problem is that space exploration requires a lot of money for no return other than glory and prestige.
The only good quote from that Esquire article:
Space demands sack. In a country that couldn't figure out how to mortgage a suburban family home, Mars suddenly seemed a long way off.
There's no cold war driving the shuttle program anymore, so it's over. And after the moon landing, and robotic probes sent to other planets, we all realized something - space is really fucking huge. It tales a long time to get anywhere, and costs a huge amount of money to send even a tiny amount of stuff out of this atmosphere. People hear about crazy plans to send people to Mars and ask "Why bother?" I tend to agree with them.
On the other hand, the space station project is something that makes sense. It's a baby step, it's something that (ideally) allows all interested countries with space agencies and some cash to participate and could someday evolve into a shipyard where exploration probes - and even manned craft - could be built and launched without having to burn a lot of rocket fuel escaping earth's gravity. Yeah, I've probably been watching too much Star Trek. But if the public could be made to understand the value of this program maybe interest would revive in space again.
The age of Asimovian idealism is over. It's the Pragmatic Age. If people can see the value of investing in space, they'll do it. But no one is buying dreams anymore.
This planet, any planet, has finite resources. No matter what we do, no matter how many alternatives we go through or how well we conserve, sooner or later we'll exhaust them. It's merely a question of how long it'll take to do so. Which means in the long term there are exactly two paths: get off this single planet, or perish. Personally I don't like option #2, and I'd like to get option #1 underway while we have the luxuries of time and resources, not wait until it's a crash program under a short deadline with limited resources.
From a practical standpoint, two things. First, opening new frontiers has never been unprofitable. It's expensive opening them up, but every one we've opened up has yielded an ROI any businessman would give up several major organs for. It's rarely immediately obvious what the rewards will be, looking back at history no major exploration ever turned up what they were looking for, but consistently the rewards are more than high enough to justify the cost. I doubt space will be different, and the spoils will go to he who's there first with the most. Second, high ground. Any military man will tell you that he who controls the high ground controls the battlefield. In ancient days the high ground was a hill so your archers could shoot down at the enemy. Today it's the airspace over the battlefield, so your aircraft can bomb the enemy without being distracted by enemy fighters. Orbit's a pretty serious high ground. Want an example? Take a look at Meteor Crater in Arizona. That was a chunk of rock coming in ballistic. Now, imagine that crater overlaid on Los Angeles, or Chicago, or Washington DC. Or all of them. Rocks are plentiful, getting them onto the right path is fairly straightforward and cheap. And shooting back up the gravity well is hideously expensive.
Outsource it and forget it, we have problems to solve here on the real world. Let the other idiots waste their time exploring the big black nothing.
Teflon was invented by accident in 1938. The space program had nothing to do with it.
Wow. I remember it like it was yesterday since I was in high school in NH at the time. I was at a boarding school and was in my dorm room waiting for the cafeteria to open for lunch when a friend came in and told me he'd heard about it on the radio. We turned on my radio and listened for a while before heading down to lunch. I guess I looked really shocked because one of the women in the serving line asked me if I was ok. I said that the shuttle had just blown up and she just laughed and said something like "oh, very funny". I snapped back at her to turn on a radio if they had one in the kitchen then went out to find a place to eat. I came back about 15 minutes later for seconds and the same woman was extremely apologetic. My friend and I then went to the student center where there was a projection tv and it seemed like 90% of the students were standing around silently watching the news coverage.
Wait a minute. The Falcon 1 has not, yet, delivered humans anywhere.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Good ol Nasa
Archduke of Krakton has given me license to prey on this sector's shipping.
* subliminal message - you should continue your manned space program * * its good for you *
Read radical news here
I also work around environmental policy, and strongly feel we'd be better off working on surviving on this planet, instead of ruining it, then going off looking for others to ruin.
We know how to survive on Earth, whether we chose to do so is a different story. For example, the Millennium Development Goals only exist because irresponsible countries have failed to implement those goals long before. Successful ways to run societies and countries have been known for centuries. Second, as someone who claims to work in space science, you surely must be aware that there's some locations in space that simply cannot be ruined, for example, the Moon.
There really isn't any reason not to do both. Few would argue that it is and either / or situation, although the specifics about who gets what and when can lead to some heated debates. Unfortunately because money is the limiting resource.
The US is a huge economy, even when it's tanking. There really isn't any reason not to fund NASA on a reasonable, sustained budget. That would go a long way to being able to make rational choices as to how to apportion money to the various aspects of space exploration. And it isn't even a matter of diverting funds to / from environmental issues. Who put most of the satellites that we're using to measure the planet up? NASA. How do you improve planet wide models of heat distribution (and hundreds of other issues) - you go somewhere else and explore other environments. Who does that? NASA.
Sure, they're bureaucratic, inefficient, wasteful and slow - but it is a complex human endeavor so what do you expect.
A better piece in Esquire and one linked to TFA is a short, humanistic blurb by Buzz Aldrin. Says it better.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
of mankind. It's what we do. We explore, and we learn. It's what we've always done. How many people died exploring the new world 500 years ago? 500 years from now, catching a flight to Mars will be just as routine as catching a flight to London is today. I only wish I could live long enough to see it...
Consider that most of what NASA builds is done by US workers it is a great way to inject money into the economy. Buy a US car and you find 47% of it is made overseas. Buy a one of a kind satellite and 99% of the cost is for American products and workers.
Consider also these engineers etc. typically work at slightly less than competitive salaries in other sectors you are getting a lot for the dollar.
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
We look at the facts. For every $ we pumped into the space program $100 came back. Not to mention all the EMPLOYMENT we got for high tech jobs. You don't think all that computer technology came from the internet do you?
It is about time we take on another LARGE task to help get this country somepride again, and to kick of a technological boom again.
As for Obama? Let's send him on a one way mission.....
I agree with you as a whole, but at SOME point, it's almost inevitable that humans will have to spread out from Earth. I'm sure the future humans would be thankful that a lot of the heavy lifting was already done when that time comes and not having to scramble when faced with potential disaster.
No sig for you!!
When the Challenger exploded, I and an unknown number of other lost their jobs, or suffered pay loss from down time.
The money spent on manned spacecraft doesn't go into a black hole. It gets spent on silly things like salaries, rent, bar tabs.
I don't know if money trickles down, but LACK of it does.
They are all here:
http://www.history.nasa.gov/Apollo204/find.html
Those little Mars rovers seem to be going strong. Lets put our money where it seems to be providing the bes
(Now the 'Buttface') However, manned space flight gives all of us hope that there's more to life than this pathetic little planet with all of its pathetic little battles. You want peace on Earth? Have an Alien ship blow up the Whitehouse.
Man needs something greater. Aside from finance, we, as citizens of the World, need to compete for something greater. Struggling on how to defeat this finance bogeyman seams so ...demeaning to all of us humans.
I also work around environmental policy, and strongly feel we'd be better off working on surviving on this planet, instead of ruining it, then going off looking for others to ruin.
Nobody said anything about "ruining" earth. Destruction of earth's biosphere is not a necessary condition for space colonization--in fact, environmental preservation and space expansion can complement each other. The technologies you use to achieve the first can feed back into the second, and vice-versa.
Those of us who support pushing out into space in terms of survival aren't talking about "let's strip-mine the earth" or "oh, it's too ruined now, let's go trash something else". We're talking about off-site backups from global threats like large asteroids, virulent pandemics, biological warfare, etc., as well as providing room for expansion.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Um, this year's SuperBowl Sunday is on 2/1/2009, not January.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
This is pseudo-philosophical nonsense. The only thing that steps out at me from this article is that we could avoid a lot of mourning if NASA took January off.
The problem with having a "space program", just like any other endeavor, requires an assessment of its value, both long-term and short-term. If these assessments of value indicate worth, we will continue to do it. If they do not, they will be shelved until we can find some previously hidden value.
Rocketeer, schmocketeer. We'd do ourselves well to put that "go where no one's gone before" mentality behind us with its promise of larger-than-life frontier exploration. The only reason an American footprint exists on the moon was because we didn't want our Cold War rivals to leave us behind in technology which might be needed in military applications against them. I love how that's been romanticized into some kind of philosophical manifest destiny.
Only when we stop looking at space travel as something heroic we do once in a while with the pomp and circumstance accorded to the victors in fierce battle will we actually find the reasons for continuing in this endeavor.
The future value of space exploration will come only from a statement of permanence and an eye toward practical concerns.
Space travel must produce scientific and engineering knowledge which increases its own capability, repetition, and safety such that space flight IS something we do every day, and not just every once in a while. Moreover, it comes from having a "next step" always on the must do list, which means that just circling the Earth, something we've known how to do for the entirety of the space program, must soon give way to actual destinations. Permanence. Furthermore, both with science/engineering benefit and possible commercial concerns (profit!), space travel must find a way to pay for itself without relying completely upon a tithe from governments. It will probably ALWAYS need to be funded by governments, big science always does, but it needs to find a way to chip in.
The big gestures like going to the moon help in the marketing of space travel and NASA as a whole, but ultimately there has to be some foundational principle of pragmatism, even in the face of the utopianism of pure science, which ironically allows the utopia its existence. It would be a shame to lose what is a necessary part of our future as a species to a set of well-meaning, yet hopelessly impractical, purist ideals.
I was just reading about the role of space in an Aviation Week blog and then find this post. I really think we need to update our Space agenda. The question is not are we mourners or rocketeers...we want to do what's best for us!
I found this blogpost that explained the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) mission
http://is.gd/hqCV
Jones makes an impassioned emotional argument for the space program, but fails to present any bald raw logical reasons why we can't stop and let it die. It's simple: the human race has NEVER before lacked a new frontier in which to expand its growing population.
Without a space program, we have no new frontiers to exploit (without further ecological backlash). The human race is not so disciplined and comfortable with itself that it can survive that absence of a frontier. We will grind civilization, if not the species entirely, into the dust if we stick our heads in the sand and try to stop expanding.
That's the simple logic of it that Jones fails to spell out.
I firmly believe that a manned mission to Mars is to be completed within my lifetime. I would love to be one of the few lucky/brave souls to partake on that adventure.
This story comes just as I finished reading Richard Feynman's account of the Rogers commission about the Challenger disaster in What Do You Care What Other People Think? that gives a rare candid look not only at the type of management attitude that led to preventable disaster, but also how it can end up getting buried in the resulting commission investigation. Interesting book, that could only come from someone with Richard Feynman's personality. (The Challenger disaster investigation is in the second half of the book.)
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
A little over a decade ago I was working on a program that used LIDAR to measure the shuttle exhaust plume constituents during liftoff. The trailer housing the lasers and telescope was positioned next to the block house for the Apollo 1 launch pad (launch complex 34). The block house has been completely emptied and sits as just a thick dome of concrete about a hundred feet in diameter. The bathrooms still work - I know, I used them - though you frequently find frogs in the toilets. Past the block house, through a rusted chain link fence and up a half mile of one-lane road surfaced in cracked seashell concrete (the concrete uses seashells for structure instead of gravel) sits the launchpad itself. It's a massive concrete table, several small outbuildings, and an enormous steel blast diverter now crumbling and rusted. There's a bronze plaque mounted on one leg of the tripod http://www.wolverhamptonclc.co.uk/wp-content/images/Plaque%20to%20commorate%20the%20Apollo%201%20astronauts.JPG and that's it. I suspect I was the first person to have walked out there and looked at it in some time.
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.
How come the anything on earth is ok between consenting adults, but signing up for high risk out of the earth career is not ok?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Letâ(TM)s keep the various issues distinct here. Obtaining resources from space can be done without (much) manned space flight. Investing in basic science can be done independent of either a manned or robotic space program. Too many comments confuse all three into âoeWe have to send people into space so we can get resources back and the investment into science makes it worthwhile anyway.â
As for the issue of humans moving off planet--it might be possible one day, but the cost to blast and maintain just one person in space indefinitely is tremendous. Orders of magnitude greater than maintaining an individual here on Earth where oxygen and water are supplied virtually for free by the planet. Itâ(TM)s like worrying that we have only 5 billion years left before the sun becomes a red giant. We should plan ahead, but more immediate problems take priority.
...unmanned missions of exploration. Space probes and planetary probes.
They cost way less than manned missions, and return way more scientific information.
How many of our own children have died in the past year to auto accidents? How many of our people have died in them? How many die to starvation because its not politically correct to remove the tyrants in power?
I will say this about astronauts and soldiers. Both sign up even after seeing the numbers because they envision something greater than themselves and are willing to pay the ultimate price to see it through. I wish I still had that courage (served from 85 to 89). Sometimes we forget just how much is paid for because people love life so much that they will do what it takes to make it better for the rest of us.
We turn a blind eye to "common" deaths and exaggerate the impact of the uncommon. I don't see to minimize Iraq but I have friends who went through Vietnam and Iraq has nothing on that. In fact two of them have children in or having served in Iraq and neither expressed any concern after talking to their children about it. I fully expect the tone about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to change simply because of who is in office.
For some numbers worldwide http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2007/pr17/en/index.html
Tell me why we aren't doing more. Its pretty twisted to ignore them too.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
It's funny how some people (not flaming you or anything) will go on and on about "for the future of the humanity" or "for humanity to survive, we must leave the Earth-Mother lest an asteroid smacks us on the head" yet would not give a flying excrement to the homeless guy down the street. Lets face it. Should humans ever manage to colonise other planets, YOU won't probably be going on the trip. You will probably be dead by then. If you're an Atheist, you don't even get the satisfaction of watching down from heaven on your great-great grand children's space hijinks. If people truly care for humanity, maybe they should instead of pining for the Alpha-Centaurian fjords, start doing something good and immediate that helps people around them.
What I think is interesting about the deaths in NASA is none of them actually happened in space. Apollo 13 might have ended badly, but it didn't. No one died on the moon because the ascent stage rocket on the LEM failed to fire. No one has had a space suit spring a leak or spiraled away during an EVA.
Seems if you're an astronaut, the safest place for you is in space.
Buy a US car and you find 47% of it is made overseas. Buy a one of a kind satellite and 99% of the cost is for American products and workers.
Nice try, but you're forgetting about volume. Even if only 53% of a US car may actually be made in the US, there are 7+million made each year. Compare that to the twenty satellites made every year. Each one would have to cost a million times as much as a car to inject the same amount of money into the economy. There are few 30 billion dollar satellites. A communications satellite can be built and put in orbit for less than $100million.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
You don't think all that computer technology came from the internet do you?
The military & NSA were also major users of computer technology. George W. Bush embarked on a pretty big task with them to give >20 million people a small chance (that I think will fail) at freedom, so lets lay off the large tasks for a while.
Well, can't be right all the time. But that is only one example. There are many others.
Adhesives, insulation, construction techniques.
What do you think of GPS? That certainly would not have been possible without an active space program. And as a result of GPS, private pilots are significantly safer than they were before it became available. And the same can be said for automobiles, but in a much more limited sense.
"We walked on the moon once, Abby."
What happened?
I bought a copy of the book Prescription for Disaster at a second-hand store. This book details the mistakes and mind-set that led to the Challenger Accident. This book should be required reading at NASA, since those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
GOOD NEWS: My copy had markings showing it had once belonged to the NASA library.
BAD NEWS: it had been discarded to a thrift store before the Columbia accident, where some of the same mistakes were repeated.
Computers obey me.
...strongly feel we'd be better off working on surviving on this planet, instead of ruining it, then going off looking for others to ruin...
Spare me. Yes, we need to work on cleaning up our own nest, but get this .. space is infinite. If only a tiny percentage of it contains habitable planets, and only a tiny percentage of those are uninhabited (say) then the number of planets for us to use is still infinite. Check your math. And if it takes generations to get even a few of those inhabited, then we win.
I rather like being alive, would like my children and their children's children to have a future, and I do not consider humanity to be a disease infecting a planet. And if you do, then whose bloody side are you on?
-- Disclosure: IAAEND (I am an ex-NASA dude).
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
What "impending end of the manned space program"? Is anyone intending to end it? Have I missed something? They just want to switch to a different vehicle, with a few years of no manned flights in between. There were no manned US flights between the last Apollo mission (1975) and the first STS mission (1981) either, so it's not as if this would be something entirely new. So what exactly is the author arguing for/against here? Continuing the Shuttle program indefinitely? Or until Ares is available?
Why are we wasting time going into space. It's too dangerous. Needless loss of life. People should not risk anything. Settlers should have not crossed the Rockies. Lewis and Clark should have stayed home. Columbus didn't need to sail the ocean blue. The Vikings should have stayed home (Definitely out of Minnesota). And to begin it all--Cavemen should have stayed inside and not have been wasting precious ink drawing on stone walls. Really, people just don't need to take those kind of risks. Stay inside. But if you do feel the need to go outside...make sure you have clean underwear on!!!
I think you hit the spot with that post.
We as a race stopped seeing the forest because all the trees are in the way. We have become a species obsessed with detail, a race of obsessive accountants and lawyers, we lost sight of the grander goal. Ants build anthills that way, by piling one grain of earth over another, but they cannot build any more complex structure because they lack a master plan.
It's very good to say "let's eradicate poverty", but is absolute equality all that mankind should aim for? There would exist no poverty if we lived in caves, sharing our stone axes equally among all.
We need something to strive for, something to work for. Religion tries to offer that, but only after death. Science and technology lets us work towards a better future while we are still living in this world. And manned space flight is one of the most difficult and worthwile goals in technology.
The US is a huge economy, even when it's tanking. There really isn't any reason not to fund NASA on a reasonable, sustained budget. That would go a long way to being able to make rational choices as to how to apportion money to the various aspects of space exploration.
Definitely. But I think Bush's "let's put all our eggs in the man-on-Mars basket" approach to budgeting has done more harm than good.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I agree with you as a whole, but at SOME point, it's almost inevitable that humans will have to spread out from Earth.
Because...? Manifest destiny? Manifest fecundity? Population is leveling off or declining in most countries developed enough to get off the planet, isn't it?
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
as someone who claims to work in space science
Sorry for not providing full disclosure up front.
you surely must be aware that there's some locations in space that simply cannot be ruined, for example, the Moon.
"cannot be ruined" in the sense that there's a treaty saying it can't be done? or in the sense that there's nothing there to really ruin? :)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
What has to occur for people to understand that manned space flight 1) is as colossally expensive as it is devoid of any redeeming scientific value, 2) far from fulfilling our need for exploration and discovery, actually prevents it, and 3) is possibly the least efficient way to explore the cosmos.
Don't start with the moronic "if Christopher Columbus blah blah blah" argument. Manned space exploration is the equivalent of Columbus going out about 10 or 20 miles from port, sailing around in circles for days or weeks, then coming back and claiming that he was investigating the effects of sailing on the human body in preparation for real exploration that never really occurs.
Manned space exploration means missions to lower earth orbit, and maybe a few trips to the moon every fifty years. Utterly pointless, of no scientific value, a caricature of "space exploration," and nothing more than a huge subsidy to the aerospace industry and the Pentagon. There is no credible or compelling reason to do it!
Unmanned space exploration is exactly the opposite. It is far less expensive and has already managed preliminary exploration of almost our entire solar system, transforming our scientific understanding of the universe in less than half a century. That is true exploration, sans bullshit emotional arguments.
For those of you enamored with the notion of a manned mission to mars, forget it. Its cost is unreachable and unjustifiable. Psychological issues cast great doubt on its human feasibility. No credible return mission has ever been put forward. It is morally unconscionable to send people on a suicide mission. Death or serious biological damage are highly likely even before they get there due to radiation and other dangers. With an enormous burden of expense year after year over decades it might be achievable, but for what? Robots have been exploring the martian surface for the better part of a decade at a miniscule fraction of the cost in time, money, and resources that would be required for a manned mission, also transforming our scientific understanding of that planet.
The idea that our destiny is to somehow leave earth a la Battlestar Galactica even more absurd for the same reasons multiplied over an even grander scale. People who hold this belief are victims of a magical religious superstition akin to a belief in a spiritual life after death. It is nothing but uninformed faith, specious emotional arguments by another name.
Grow up, people. We are adults, not silly uneducated children.
I would still sign up to go for a ride tomorrow.
I will never understand why we aren't doing one way missions to mars using people with cancer (or other 2 years to live type illnesses).
Ship some cargo containers to the planned landing site.
Ship the cancernauts and have it be show like big brother (an hourly episode to air on tv each night).
It would pay for itself!
Heck, you mean in well over a hundred flights over nearly 47 years, we've only lost 17 people?
I'd say that's pretty amazing!
"cannot be ruined" in the sense that there's a treaty saying it can't be done? or in the sense that there's nothing there to really ruin? :)
The latter. The Outer Space Treaty will eventually be overturned or renegotiated. Sure there are some modest aesthetic constraints, eg, don't turn the Moon into a giant flashing advertisement. But there just isn't much on the Moon to spoil.
Sorry for not providing full disclosure up front.
Sorry, I was snidely refering to your comment about not ruining the Earth first before we ruin other places. Why ideologically align yourself with a mealy-mouthed, navel gazing future that would treat your profession as something in a zoo, barely tolerated for diversity purposes? When instead you could be in a future where your profession is highly valued because it allows civilization to exist? Sure a few worlds will be ruined because humans will bring their bad side with them, but that seems a small price for a future where you matter and life is prevalent in the universe.
Why ideologically align yourself with a mealy-mouthed, navel gazing future that would treat your profession as something in a zoo, barely tolerated for diversity purposes? When instead you could be in a future where your profession is highly valued because it allows civilization to exist?
I deal professionally with both the study of things beyond this planet and the study of how to exist sustainably on this planet, so I don't see this being a binary choice, or necessarily see the dichotomy existing at all. I'm not directly engaged in researching how to live in space, on the Moon, etc - those folks are down the hall from me - but I've seen their technology, heard the briefings from NASA folks, and so on.
Yes, there are risks to focusing entirely on this planet. But places like the Moon and Mars have their own drawbacks, in part due to their lower mass and resultant lack of a thick atmosphere. The atmosphere is annoying to us on the astronomy side, since it messes up the view, but it's quite handy for protecting us from radiation and falling rocks. If you really want a comparable new home, you'll be needing something closer to 1 Earth mass. And we who work in astronomy, with NASA or the folks who study exoplanets, are working on delivering that.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Okay, so we make Panama (which is close enough to the equator) our 51st state and build our rectennae in its offshore territorial waters. Then we strike a deal with Cuba to give us permission to run an underground power line across their island just outside of Havana in return for some free electricity. Connect the line to the tip of Florida and into our power grid and it's done. (Actually, Panama would probably become our 52nd state, just to keep from pissing off the Puerto Ricans.