This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: A new space vision
Feed Title: Richard Demers Blog
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rademers-rss.xml
Feed Description: Richard Demers on Smalltalk
Report: new space vision to offer little change says NASA will continue to spend $15B/year on more of the same uninteresting and uninspiring programs: getting the obsolete shuttle flying again, finishing the space station that know one knows why we need, and developing shuttle 2. Meanwhile, the scientific community keeps whining about a search for life in outer space that hardly anyone on Earth cares about, as if that could possibly be a justification for spending billions to go to Mars. And the builders of robotic probes to the planets want us to keep spending more billions to get more pretty pictures.
I'm not saying it has all been big waste; it hasn't. The U.S. has gotten a lot of prestige and a lot of technical knowledge from the space program, but doing more of the same is just doing more of the same. This "new vision" is no vision at all; it is just myopia.
There are good, reasons for putting people into space that need to be marketed persuasively; reasons based solidly on those two champion human motivators, fear and greed. This is a small dangerous planet that we live on, with hazards everywhere we look, all capable of wiping our civilization away in the blink of an eye. We need to put some of our eggs into other baskets! That's the fear scenario; now lets talk greed. There are unlimited resources in our solar system alone, there for the picking -- resources that can make us all rich beyond our wildest dreams. But we have to go get them.
Leave it to a government agency to come up with a visionless vision. My hope for the future of man is space lies with private entrepreneurs. Who else is better capable of capitalizing on fear and greed?
Previous Topic
