I'm glad we're hurling more objects at Mars and all, but I'm amazed at the slowness with which we're exploring everyone's favourite big red bouncy ball. After all, it's been nearly a third of a century since we first put men on the moon, and yet that's as far as we've sent humans and, what's worse, we haven't even hurled very many probes out to our planetary neighbours. What's the total number? Not many...
I think we need to switch our time scales a bit here - when it comes to most things, and especially space travel, a third of a century is NOTHING. Space travel is now where evolution was in the time of one-celled organisms.
Granted, with the accelerate pace of technology these days, we should be more than able to build robust probes and send men to the distant reaches of our solar system, but man isn't perfect. Even the space program to date has been a bit of a kludge - the Space Shuttle ended up being some horrible political vehicle that can do everything for everyone, but none of it well; the Apollo launches could have been much more sustainable if they had planted a stage in orbit and used that as a pushing off point - it could have been a manned space station well before Mir or Spacelab.
But instead of great moments like these, we can look forward to much smaller events and less publicly enthralling ones. Quite sad, when our government spends $3 *T*rillion a year, that we "don't have the money" to explore space as vigorously as we did in the first decades of the space program.
This is a tired refrain, as others have pointed out. So long as our government is spending money on more than one thing at a time, any nimrod can use it to point out how "screwed up" our nation's priorities are. There are no right answers to these questions - it's simply what we and our elected representatives decide NASA is worth to humanity. Don't get me wrong - I'm all for spending lots of money on the space program - but there is the reality of our situation on earth to consider before allocating resources.
Nothing that can be done with a mere probe can top the Pathfinder images, except for finding Martian or Ionian or Europan life. But, here's hoping...
This is rather pessimistic, don't you think? Our probes are the technological equivalent of toddlers, and today's technology has hardly been brought to bear on remote imaging and exploration, much less tomorrow's techno-magic. Let's wait and see before making any sweeping pronouncements.
It seems clear that the era of government spending many billions on a single space mission are over, and that the private sector now has the cash, resources, and expertise to begin building the next Microsofts and Ciscos of that industry. Read Robert Zubrin's "Entering Space" for a good overview of what it would take to get there - *way* out there.
ZDNet is not one to post these things on a whim, so if they were confident enough to publish the story, I feel pretty good about their "sources." They're so rumor-shy that their "Quick Picks" rumor section disappeared after a few weeks, doubtless because somebody important pulled a "cease-and-desist" on them. Normally, these rumors languish on MOSR or AppleInsider for months before they appear on ZDNet - I was kind of surprised they posted the story so far in advance.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad we're hurling more objects at Mars and all, but I'm amazed at the slowness with which we're exploring everyone's favourite big red bouncy ball. After all, it's been nearly a third of a century since we first put men on the moon, and yet that's as far as we've sent humans and, what's worse, we haven't even hurled very many probes out to our planetary neighbours. What's the total number? Not many...
I think we need to switch our time scales a bit here - when it comes to most things, and especially space travel, a third of a century is NOTHING. Space travel is now where evolution was in the time of one-celled organisms.
Granted, with the accelerate pace of technology these days, we should be more than able to build robust probes and send men to the distant reaches of our solar system, but man isn't perfect. Even the space program to date has been a bit of a kludge - the Space Shuttle ended up being some horrible political vehicle that can do everything for everyone, but none of it well; the Apollo launches could have been much more sustainable if they had planted a stage in orbit and used that as a pushing off point - it could have been a manned space station well before Mir or Spacelab.
But instead of great moments like these, we can look forward to much smaller events and less publicly enthralling ones. Quite sad, when our government spends $3 *T*rillion a year, that we "don't have the money" to explore space as vigorously as we did in the first decades of the space program.
This is a tired refrain, as others have pointed out. So long as our government is spending money on more than one thing at a time, any nimrod can use it to point out how "screwed up" our nation's priorities are. There are no right answers to these questions - it's simply what we and our elected representatives decide NASA is worth to humanity. Don't get me wrong - I'm all for spending lots of money on the space program - but there is the reality of our situation on earth to consider before allocating resources.
Nothing that can be done with a mere probe can top the Pathfinder images, except for finding Martian or Ionian or Europan life. But, here's hoping...
This is rather pessimistic, don't you think? Our probes are the technological equivalent of toddlers, and today's technology has hardly been brought to bear on remote imaging and exploration, much less tomorrow's techno-magic. Let's wait and see before making any sweeping pronouncements.
It seems clear that the era of government spending many billions on a single space mission are over, and that the private sector now has the cash, resources, and expertise to begin building the next Microsofts and Ciscos of that industry. Read Robert Zubrin's "Entering Space" for a good overview of what it would take to get there - *way* out there.
ZDNet is not one to post these things on a whim, so if they were confident enough to publish the story, I feel pretty good about their "sources." They're so rumor-shy that their "Quick Picks" rumor section disappeared after a few weeks, doubtless because somebody important pulled a "cease-and-desist" on them. Normally, these rumors languish on MOSR or AppleInsider for months before they appear on ZDNet - I was kind of surprised they posted the story so far in advance.