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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?"
Without shooting people into space, we'd never have known about how fast bone mass decreases within just a few weeks.
Of course there are other technologies and issues that have cropped up that have impacted your life that were either a direct or indirect result of the various space programs. For a list go here! Some include scratch resistant lenses and cochlear implants.
The Russians don't schedule manned launches during week in October for the same reasons...
"PowerPoint Sucks!" Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense
This should be the number one objective of ALL space programs on earth:
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/070919_sps_airforce.html
If it's going to scale out, it should have solar energy collectors in a solar orbit. They should beam the energy to one of three geostationary satellite floating above the Earth. Those satellites should beam the energy to receiving stations in Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia, at which point they should be fed into the global power grid.
This would allow us to increase production for hundreds of generations of mankind, simply by adding additional solar energy collectors.
It won't be easy, but it only has to be done once.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
It is truly sad that the space program is not at the forefront anymore. Lets consider the cost...
NASA 2008 Budget: $17.318 Billion
The federal government throws this amount of money around all of the time. Heck, lately it's almost a rounding error with all of the spending going on. To put this in perspective, $8 billion dollars is currently earmarked for "state and tribal assistance grants" in the new stimulus package coming out. (see this spreadsheet ).
What are the gains? When the Apollo program was running it caught the public's fascination. It made an entire generation of kids that wanted to be astronauts. It made "rocket scientist" become part of our nomenclature and synonymous with "really smart guy". And most importantly, it spurred an interest in engineering and the "hard" sciences (math, physics, chemistry). The knee-jerk response of today's youth is that these subjects are too hard and not fun enough. And so the US is losing engineers and knowledge workers and replacing them with massage therapists . How many people in 1965 thought that the best job in the world would be to work at NASA? How many think that now? (or for that matter, how many think that ANY engineering job would be ideal for them?)
In addition to inspiring the public to idolize something besides the latest Hollywood tabloid, the space program made numerous technological and engineering breakthroughs that we are still benefiting from tremendously today. The difficulties of doing even simple things under the constraints of space exploration force tremendous ingenuity and resourcefulness that the nation then benefits from as a whole.
As with any new innovations you can't expect to see the full extent of what it offers immideatly.
The first electric generator gave few clues to the enormous ones powered by exotic fuels we have nowdays that supply entire nations with electricity around the clock. The electric generator however was a very simple construct that you could improve on your own provided a small capital.
Space programs on the other hand are enormous projects requiring equally enormous capital investments with a very long period before you see any real money from it. Right now it's mainly sattelites that make up commercial money in space, but there is a definite interest in space. The price tag is a bit prohibitive but as long as spacetravel is in demand for someone we'll keep up improving it.
In the end however it may be too early to pump in wast amounts of money in the program as the general technology level can't really supply what would be needed for a properly extensive space program.