Thread: Worth The Mission?
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Old July 1st 06, 05:08 AM posted to sci.space.policy,sci.space.moderated
Fred J. McCall
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Default Worth The Mission?
h (Rand Simberg) wrote:

:On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 09:39:25 -0400, in a place far, far away, "Jeff
:Findley" made the phosphor on my monitor
:glow in such a way as to indicate that:
:
:My question is this, is it even possible for NASA to find a truly heroic
:goal for our heroic astronauts?
:
:I'm not sure there is (though an expedition to Mars or an asteroid
:might suffice). I'm also not sure that we should want to.

Then you're making sure that human exploration of space is stillborn.
Somebody has to push the frontiers out and that isn't going to be
private industry or random groups of middle-class folks. That wasn't
how it was done 500 years ago and that's certainly not how it's going
to work now.

:I'd rather get people to think about space as a new frontier where all
:kinds of pioneers can go, and risk their lives for their own goals and
urposes, rather than as a preserve for heroic government employees.

I'd rather see both. What you're seeing now in 'private space' is the
results of the seed corn planted for all us old farts back in the
1960s and 1970s by that government exploration you dislike so much.
Once we start getting private LEO flight that's going to be pretty
much done, if it even gets that far. After all, for private space to
want to get to orbit there sort of has to be something there to go to.

You're thinking like the development of the airplane, except that in
the case of the airplane there were already places to go to spur
private growth. You need to think more like the Age of Exploration.
Most of those voyages were government-sponsored.

--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw