I think I first saw the Space Shuttle in Moonraker in 1980, I must have been about five and went to see the film with my family (I think maybe for my brother’s birthday or something). Up until then, to me, real spaceships were long and pretty boring looking rockets and spaceships in movies were pretty damn cool, I remember thinking the spaceship in Moonraker was pretty damn cool. It must have been a couple of years later that I found out it was real. This excited the hell out of me.
Even then I was into Sci-Fi and space movies (I was a Star Wars kid after all) but here was real space flight in something that looked like some kind of space fighter compared to the Apollos and Soyuzs on the news. For a long time after that I wanted to be an astronaut.
I’m not an astronaut, by the way.
So, today saw the last ever Space Shuttle mission lift off from Cape Canaveral. Shuttle Atlantis departed on a twelve day mission taking with it bunch of supplies for the ISS and seemingly humanity’s hopes for space exploration. Although NASA have been talking some damage control about the future of human space flight looking bright, this is essentially the US government starving NASA of funding and brining the hammer down on the US space program. Barack Obama himself has proposed the agency's budget be frozen right through to the Fiscal Year 2016.
This is pretty awful, and considering the amount of money America has spent waging war on the middle east for no other reason than to steal their oil, pretty repugnant too.
Manned space flight is so important for so many reasons. For a start, without exploration mankind will stagnate. I’m sure conservative America thinks it knows all it needs to know and loves the status quo but humanity will fester, wither and die without exploration, curiosity and discovery. The need to know, to understand and to learn is what makes us human. To financially favour war over curiosity and intrepidity is just an insult to the human race.
If analysed the NASA space program makes more (real) money than war ever will, I won’t bore myself with figures but so much of what you take for granted in your everyday life came from, or was for, NASA. Not just the hi-tech gadgetry that dominates our lives these days but stull like Teflon, air cushioned trainers, scratch resistant shades, ready meals, brakes in cars, satellite TV, rape alarms, the microwave and almost any piece of 'green' technology, from silicon crystal solar panels to water recycling. All NASA!!!
Without a manned space flight program so much innovation stands still.
NASA’s space program, which cost $2 billion less a year than the Iraq war does a month yielded a nine times return.
Seriously, the American treasury need to come back to the boardroom and one of them should get fired. ;P.
Budget freezing has also meant either a full stop, or severe, years, delays to the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope too. You know how much we know about our universe because of the Hubble telescope? The James Webb Space Telescope would (or will) have made Hubble look like a child’s toy.
Do some Americans, in positions of power really like remaining ignorant? Yes there is a global economic crisis afoot, I know, it’s affected me more than a lot of people, but did you read the bit about ‘nine times return’ and staggeringly cheaper than some ridiculous war the American government seems quite happy to perpetuate?
So maybe we can look to Russia or China for the future of space exploration, or maybe we’ll have to wait ten or fifteen years for the US government to sort it’s priorities out.
Whatever, it’s a fucking shame is all.
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