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"The Future of Human Spaceflight"
I was just looking at "The Future of Human Spaceflight" by David Mindell
et al at MIT, and I think it illustrates a fundamental error in how people are thinking about space. What is space for? We can skip right over a lot of abstract stuff by using an analogy out of Europe in the early 1500's, "What is America for?" Our history answers that one easily: it's for people. Likewise, space is for people, and Frederick Jackson Turner's paper (thanks, Robert Zubrin) outlines how people and cultures will develop there. But when I look at what's being said on this space topic, it's all *Terra centered.* Space is seen as a place where you send out machines to study hostile environments (why?), which people visit very briefly and hustle "back home," a method for diverting some of a small government cash stream won from the military industrial to possibly innovative purposes. (If people had some idea what that 'innovative' is.) I think that's where today's discussion has basically turned a wrong corner and busily gets us nowhere. Besides provoking an amazing amount of verbal rubbish. The root problem seems to me, to be, get unhooked from that Terra center to things, and realize space is an awfully big place and let's get our point of view unhooked from Terra and focussed out there where it needs to be. So it seems to me, apart from the trolls here who are best managed by placing them on twit/no-read lists, much of the remaining material here is just noise which could be focussed and turned to good effect simply by recognizing the immense potential of space *for people*. Titeotwawki -- mha [sci.space.policy 2009 Jan 09] |
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