April 28, 2006
The man in the moon has dollar signs in his eyes
Thus far all of NASA’s forays outside the Earth’s atmosphere have been costly amusements, curiosities and occasionally tragedies, but now the cash-draining science club at Mission Control see a new potential in the heavens, a profit potential.
NASA just concluded their Exploration Strategy Workshop where representative scientists from many space faring nations met to discuss potential plans for exploring the moon and beyond. Sure we’re still not very successful at sending large ships up and back with regularity, but now at least we have a good reason to think about living out Our Fine President’s dream of returning to the moon. Talking with the media after the conference ended, NASA deputy administrator Shana Dale said “The teams recognize the critical importance of space commerce — having real companies going to the moon and making money. The government needs to be a trailblazer and enabler (with) a desire to see commerce take off.”
Some of the breakout sessions even discussed the concept of creating a lunar legal system and which side of the road cars will drive on up there. Now I’m all for wild imaginations, but it might be time for everyone to take breath and relax a bit. As I pointed out earlier, we’re not very good at sending people into space, and sometimes we still catastrophically mess up our robotic space fun. In fact, we’re not even all that good at living down here on Earth. We’ve got a bunch of stuff down here that we broke or at least changed. I think it might be a better idea to focus our scientific efforts toward fixing or adapting to things down here and understanding how to function on Earth without making things less habitable. Once we make some progress down there we can head on up and start wrecking our perfectly good moon.
But Dale and Our Fine President actually made my point for me. In her opening remarks at the workshop she said “But it’s been 35 years since we ventured beyond Low Earth Orbit. It is now time as President Bush said two years ago ‘to extend a human presence across our solar system.’” See there’s probably a very good reason why we haven’t gone beyond the Mir space station since the 70’s, maybe it’s that space flight is difficult and costly and very hard to practice without a few spectacular crashes. And then of course there’s Bush’s dream of spreading the human presence beyond Earth. I know he thinks he’s doing a bang up job down here, but our planet still faces war, famine, poverty, organized persecution, mass cruelty, violent ethnic and religious divisiveness, widespread intolerance of difference and unchecked corruption around the world. Maybe after we can knock down a few of those vices and faults we can start talking about extending our presence.