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Forty years ago tonight...
Jul. 20th, 2009 10:20 pmI stood on the short stairway that led from the dining room of our house to the den, where the television was, and watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon and make history.
Since the last human stepped off the moon, scientists and engineers have compiled an impressive list of achievements, certainly in the field of remote exploration and measurement, as well as in space medicine, materials science, and other areas associated with human space flight.
There are those who say the whole thing, from the time Gagarin flew, has been a waste of time, money, and resources.
I, on the other hand, believe that, in addition to the many "spinoffs" NASA likes to brag about, some of the key technologies developed for space - especially remote sensing technology - have kept everyone's ICBMs and the associated nuclear weapons developed during the weapons race of the Cold War from being used, and thus, have made said time, money, and resources an excellent investment.
Does the U.S. have a future in space? I don't know. Despite all the rhetoric, I'm pretty sure the government's going to get out of the human space flight business, though it may have to let the fish flop around on the ground for a little bit before putting it out of its misery.
In the end, I'm not sure this won't be a good thing, for if the Space Transportation System (aka, the Shuttle) has taught us anything, it is that governments tend to put all their eggs in one basket and do so exclusively for political reasons. (Heck, back in the day, I thought "beating the Russians" was the icing on the cake of exploring space and landing on the moon; government papers released since then show that, in fact, things were exactly opposite.)
And political reasons almost always run counter to reasons of economy, efficiency, and responsiveness, and thereby obtain results that aren't just less-than-optimum, but mediocre or worse. And being political, there's no feasible way to compete or to change things, except to vote the rascals out (and, by extension, your rascals in). But don't get me started.
Private enterprise - what's left of it - will step in if there's a chance to make a dollar by fulfilling a need. But as the recent housing bubble has shown, governments love to skew the economic playing field for what it perceives are desirable ends, even though the history of such manipulation is littered with some pretty spectacular failures.
In the end, tf our government places obstacles - either direct or indirect - in the way of private space flight development, I think you can expect the "language of space" to eventually become Chinese, or maybe even Russian.
Because humanity most definitely has a future in space, and I saw that first step.
Cheers...
Since the last human stepped off the moon, scientists and engineers have compiled an impressive list of achievements, certainly in the field of remote exploration and measurement, as well as in space medicine, materials science, and other areas associated with human space flight.
There are those who say the whole thing, from the time Gagarin flew, has been a waste of time, money, and resources.
I, on the other hand, believe that, in addition to the many "spinoffs" NASA likes to brag about, some of the key technologies developed for space - especially remote sensing technology - have kept everyone's ICBMs and the associated nuclear weapons developed during the weapons race of the Cold War from being used, and thus, have made said time, money, and resources an excellent investment.
Does the U.S. have a future in space? I don't know. Despite all the rhetoric, I'm pretty sure the government's going to get out of the human space flight business, though it may have to let the fish flop around on the ground for a little bit before putting it out of its misery.
In the end, I'm not sure this won't be a good thing, for if the Space Transportation System (aka, the Shuttle) has taught us anything, it is that governments tend to put all their eggs in one basket and do so exclusively for political reasons. (Heck, back in the day, I thought "beating the Russians" was the icing on the cake of exploring space and landing on the moon; government papers released since then show that, in fact, things were exactly opposite.)
And political reasons almost always run counter to reasons of economy, efficiency, and responsiveness, and thereby obtain results that aren't just less-than-optimum, but mediocre or worse. And being political, there's no feasible way to compete or to change things, except to vote the rascals out (and, by extension, your rascals in). But don't get me started.
Private enterprise - what's left of it - will step in if there's a chance to make a dollar by fulfilling a need. But as the recent housing bubble has shown, governments love to skew the economic playing field for what it perceives are desirable ends, even though the history of such manipulation is littered with some pretty spectacular failures.
In the end, tf our government places obstacles - either direct or indirect - in the way of private space flight development, I think you can expect the "language of space" to eventually become Chinese, or maybe even Russian.
Because humanity most definitely has a future in space, and I saw that first step.
Cheers...
