Again, I'm out of it. Growing up, I thought that the fascination with space was weird. Mind you, I loved reading science fiction, and started at it pretty early, but I liked the people/places/things, not the rockets. By age 10, I realized that, even if the US colonized the moon, there was a near-zero chance that I would get to be one of them. I also knew enough about planetary environmental science to know that we were not going to colonize any other planet in my lifetime. And I didn't believe that the scientific benefits of the space program were going to be that great.
As I got older, my interest in the space program waned even further. When I studied political science, I discovered that a fairly large number of American military folks die each year in non-war events, such as during battle practice, building and testing weapons, and so on. It turns out, the same is true for the space program. My college friends who were going into aerospace could never explain to me how what they did could help anyone here on earth. In my mind, I wrote off the space budget as "boys and their toys", less destructive and less expensive than much of our military.
But it always amazed me to hear people be surprised when astronauts die on space missions. Space is incredibly dangerous, and just planning for space launches is too. Space shots aren't easy: it is a lot of volatile chemicals, intense friction, huge forces, and terrible vibration. And people die building all the infrastructure needed to launch and land spacecraft. NASA doesn't talk much about this in public because it would scare everyone way, but it is completely obvious to anyone who has worked even tangentially with space missions. Obviously, we should grieve with the families of the astronauts who died today; not-so-obviously, we should grieve with the families of everyone who died making this mission possible.
And then there is the question of the benefit for the cost. Some dreams are free, and those can be pursued easily; other dreams are far from free, and pursuing them means paying a lot of money and some lives. Space exploration falls into that second category. The hundreds of billions spent on the space program in the post-moon era could have had an amazing effect on many lives here on earth had it been spent on different dreams. Maybe it's time for different people's dreams to get a chance at that budget.
Posted by lookit at February 1, 2003 11:34 AM
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