Cassini Discovers Strong Evidence for Lakes on Titan

Leonard C Robinson wrote:

The Commodore unto Henry: greetings.

The Commodore is reminded of T. A. Heppenheimer's "The REAL Futu
Tomorrow's Technology Today," written 1982. It has long since gone out of
print, but much the same problems are still with us, a quarter-century
later.

Planetary missions, Dr. Heppenheimer (PhD, CalTech) wrote, are funded out of
the National Budget, and the needs (or the whines) of the domestic interests
have a greater pull on Capitol Hill. The same is true of missions with human
crews. Since "Challenger" exploded with all aboard, & "Columbia" burned up
on re-entry, killing all on board, a reluctance has been expressed against
risking people to the vacuum of Space; this reluctance has been expressed on
Capitol Hill, NASA, ESA, and other activities.

What will have to happen is either an asteroid on a killer trajectory with
Planet Earth in its crosshairs,

Once (and assuming) we successfully deflect the sucker, then what?
My guess is mostly back to business as usual, except possibly steadier
funding for ongoing asteroid surveys. Since this can be done reasonably
well with a few dedicated ground-based telescopes, that's not much
money, anyway.

or SETI is proven correct, and ETI found
"out there in the vastness of space".

Which might get NASA back into the SETI game, but again, more money
for dedicated ground-based (radio) telescopes, and back to business as
usual, since making an interstellar spacecraft as part of our response
is far too much of a jump beyond present capabilities.

If you're *very* lucky, you might make a stronger case for Lunar
farside radio/optical telescopes, but dont expect asteroid threats or a
real SETI signal to be the 'killer app' for that, by itself. Not unless
development of an effective Lunar transportation infrastructure was
already well underway, and the above projects could ride its coattails...

(Alternate: private industry and the
Space Hilton.) Until then, all Space Agencies are haphazard bureaucracies,
at the whim of a legislative body which sees monies spent on Space which
could be spent better on the poor who have votes.


Hear, hear.


--

Frank

You know what to remove to reply...

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