Is the final frontier closed?

Space shuttle Atlantis stands on a launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida as it's prepared for the final shuttle mission. (NASA/Terry Zaperach)

The 30-year old space shuttle program will end after one more flight of the Atlantis, and there doesn’t seem to be a clear plan, not for America at least, to push human space exploration further any time soon. The launch of the 12-day mission is scheduled for July 8.

NASA’s budget, now at about $18.5 billion, is slated to stay fairly level over the next five years. Plans are to rely more on commercial space ventures while developing “game changing” technology that can propel people deeper into space, including Mars and the asteroid belt, and much faster than would be possible today.

Columnist Derrick Z. Jackson laments the lack of a strong outward direction. It’s not enough, he argues, to sample an asteroid or plan vaguely to get to Mars at some point.

Bill Wrobel, NASA’s director of the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, still sees good things ahead, at least in terms of one state’s role.

The space program, it’s often pointed out, isn’t all about just getting there. It has added technologies and products to our daily lives, like wireless headsets, UV and scratch resistant coating on glasses, reflective insulation, memory foam, and ingestible toothpaste  (but not, despite the myth, Tang). NASA has long had a Technology Utilization Program to foster this.  Here’s an interactive feature that lets you explore a house, or a city, for NASA-influenced technology.

We’ve peered about 14 billion light years into space, as far as light seems to allow us to probe both space and time.Right now, the farthest human-made object launched into space is Voyager 1, somewhere around 9 billion miles away and headed for interstellar space. We’ve journeyed, though, only to the moon, or around 238,857 miles. Some people putter around in cars on this pale blue dot more than a round trip to the moon over the course of a lifetime.

If you followed that last link and listened to Carl Sagan’s reading from his book, I suspect you had one of two reactions: Either “There are more important things to worry about and put our resources and energy into, right here on Earth, than a costly space program,” or, “Where has our spirit of exploration gone?”

What do you think? Should we have a more defined goal, and should we be putting more money into it? Or are we right to be more austere with the space program, at least for now?

P.S. to fellow geeks: You can click today’s picture for the full-size 3000 x 2000 res. Look closely and you may see Gary Seven and his cat.

Should we spend more on the space program?

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Jay Jochnowitz

2 Responses

  1. Random Person says:

    I’m an astronomy buff. I love learning about what’s beyond our atmosphere, and wondering about what’s out there that we don’t know. There’s so much out there that no one person could possible even hope to know that tiniest fraction of what’s there, and that fascinates me.

    But, let’s be realistic…

    In our solar system, which is the only part of space we could ever hope to get to in our lifetimes, there’s really nothing for us. Our two best bets are the Moon and Mars. The former is a lifeless hunk of airless rock, and the latter is a much further away hunk of rock with some ice and a paltry, poisonous atmosphere.

    Neither of those places have what we really need: a hearty atmosphere and/or a magnetic field. Either would protect us from the deadly cosmic and solar radiation. Without those, people would take in a LOT of radiation and probably die. Yes, Mars has some water, but what of it? We have water here, and it wouldn’t cost us the billions or maybe trillions it would take to get there and survive there, then come back.

    And further out it is even worse. Jupiter’s magnetic field is so strong it would probably kill us, and past that it’s way too cold. Titan has liquid methane. That’s cold!

    The simple fact is that beyond low Earth orbit, space is very, very deadly. If something went wrong, there would be no help coming. And the returns we would get, through technological innovation, exploration, and the search for natural resources, just don’t seem enough. People lived without it for all of human history, except for the last 40 years or so.

    I don’t like it. Not one bit. I’d give significant portions of my anatomy to go to Mars, but it just seems pointless and expensive.

  2. iknowtruthismine says:

    We have a near miss of a rather nasty asteroid coming up next year, that may very well come back to bite us in the keister on the next go around, if it goes through what scientists call the “key-hole”, a spot in space that will put it on course for the hit. Needless to say, there are other Earth busters out there and it is only a matter of time before one of them (like Shoemaker-Levy did to Jupiter) slams into us. The object that slammed into Jupiter was large enough to have wiped out all higher life on Earth, had it hit here. If you think we don’t need to get out into space, then you are placing all of Humanity’s eggs in a very fragile basket. In as much as we will probably have advanced warning of an impending hit, we better make sure we are in a position to redirect any threat, or the last of us, in the billions, will be standing there looking up and asking, for the last time, what we did (or didn’t do)to deserve this fate.