I offer this not because of the political message, but simply because the late, great Carl Sagan — and wow, has it really been 14-plus years since he died? — rocks:
I offer this not because of the political message, but simply because the late, great Carl Sagan — and wow, has it really been 14-plus years since he died? — rocks:
I’d quibble with one point. (and since this is an official NASA promo, perhaps the main point)
The future of space exploration is not nations or groups of nations, it is private entrepreneurs. The role of nations and governments at this point is to get out of the away, and allow these pioneers and explorers to build and launch their rockets and space planes.
Absolutely, we need unregulated private companies putting stuff in space using highly volatile rockets. What a brilliant idea. And oh, to look up at the night sky and see the Wal*Mart logo plastered all over the moon. Not to mention the possibility of some private terrorist organization taking control of a space plane and detonating a nuke in low earth orbit to create an infrastructure crippling EMP pulse. By all means, lets keep the government out of it. They can’t do anything right anyway (like being the only ones to go to the moon).
It’s not an official NASA promo. It’s an unofficial NASA promo.
If #2 wasn’t *already* davidkian, I would have to question his grasp on reality …
One has to suspect that part of the reason that Columbus had to go to Spain for support was because the Italian City States each had their own version of davidkianism going at the time …
“some private terrorist organization “ – hmmmmm, ya mean like the bin Ladin and the 19+ who committed 9/11 ? Good thing the Government and its Gorelick Wall succeeded in keeping somethign like that from happening in the past, ain’t it ?
How about, instead, some rational responses, like having private enterprise comply with rational and existing safety standards, and then competing to build the most effective and safe vehicle they can, to explore the rest of our solar system, and, eventually, beyond ?
How about Government preventing “some private terrorist organization “ from stealing whatever vehicles are being developed, rather than Ludditely and davidkianly banning developing them ?
As for the whole EMP thing, a nuke exploded 7 miles up over the centre of the US (as in a conventional jumbo jet) is already going to significantly mess up our infrastructure and tech devices … oh, the humanity ! All those iPhones reduced (even more) to fashionable proprietary paperweights … and, in davidkian’s “minds”, still all the fault of The Eeevil Boosh ™ !
David K:..Spoken like a true big government Liberal.
No matter what we do, there is going to come a time when private individuals will have the capability to fly into space. If we ban/overly restrict the right to fly into space in the United States, someone..say Guyana or Liberia…will allow them to fly into space from their country.
It is in our own best interests to instead become the focal point for such exploration/exploitation.
If you had been around in 1903 I bet you would have been railing against the Wright brothers…”Why someone could drop a bomb with one of those things, or drag a banner ad behind it, or crash one into the Whitehouse.
I had forgotten how distinctive his voice/speech patterns could be …
I have to wonder how Mr Sagan would have responded to the idea that NASA should be used to try to increase the self-esteem of Muslims ?
By the way, if the US military does not have an operational space plane, then the Defense Dept is guilty of criminal neglect.
And if they don’t, the only rational choice at this point is to buy space planes from Virgin Galactic, and hire them to develop and build a near-space fighter.
At this point space already has a very high commercial relevance. But since Sputnik there is also a metric F* ton of junk in space. It is important to have, essentially, international air traffic control for space for all the stuff we are putting up there. To maintain that vital commercial relevance we do need to have a plan for how we use the space. There are a limited number of functional orbits for different tasks some of which are already cluttered up with broken down junk.
To wit, the future of near earth space especially is commercial enterprise. Government rockets are not sufficient and have not really iterated forward much in terms of what they can carry in decades. This limits the design options and drives up the cost of the satellites we put in space.
So we need to have commercial space involvement. It’s vital. But we also need regulation, it is also vital. I don’t think this is really that shocking or complex a point.