Archive: Opinions

I think we need to send people to begin a colony on Mars within the next decade.  It may be retro of me, but I think we need a big-reach bipartisan project like Kennedy's moon landing that everyone can rally around.  Sure we have problems to solve here on Earth, but even a well funded space program costs a small fraction of the overall federal budget, and let's face it: no matter how much money we throw at our our earth-bound problems, how good, really, have we been at solving them?

There is also the image piece.  When we worked at putting mem on the moon we were a can-do nation, working step by step toward an amazing goal.  We were explorers, leaders in science, moving mankind to, without getting too Star Trekkie about it, the final frontier.  It challenged our imaginations and the imaginations of people around the world.  Winning that space race was an amazing boost to our national identity and pride.  And the incidental technology that made its way into our everyday lives was revolutionary.

Yep, I remember my first electronic calculator.  It cost me $40.  And I remember when they started powering them with little tiny solar panels built into the increasingly smaller handheld devices.  Which begat computers, which begat iPods, cell phones and now smart cell phones.

This was cool stuff.  It's still fun to eat freeze-dried ice cream, available from the NASA store, even though the powdery mess is kind of hideous.  Maybe, but it is symbolically delicious, because it comes from a time when the nation was one, focussed on a goal of exploration and the expansion of human knowledge.

What we have now is a depressed nation, split down the middle and trying to come to terms with its decline as a world leader.  Our manufacturing prowess has been co-opted, and even a lot of our technological leadership has been effectively challenged by other nations to the point where we can't understand the person who we call to get technical support because their accent is so thick.

I interviewed the two congressional candidates running in next year's election, and both said we don't need a big space goal right now.  They had other priorities.

I disagree.  Space is a neutral kind of goal.  Sure you can politicize everything, but space has an aura of non-politicized and somewhat non-militarized endeavor.  The International Space Station is more than just a symbolic cooperative effort -- it is actually cooperative.  Not long ago a Canadian astronaut hit it big on YouTube with his music video of himself playing guitar and singing.

Our modern society has lost its sense of the importance of symbolic projects.  Roosevelt had the New Eisenhower had the New Deal. Eisenhower had federal highways.  Kennedy had space.  Actually any of those would be good right now.  I favor space because it is big and it is new and we can learn so much more by doing it.  Building more roads is just building more roads at this point in history.  But going to Mars is a true challenge with all the unknowns that would have to be overcome to reach a big goal.

Meeting a challenge like that would bring back national pride and our sense of can-doedness that would color all our endeavors.  It would put us back in that essential mind frame we need to grow our country again.

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