I grew up with a romanticized view of the space program, which I suppose is true of a lot kids who grew up in the "Space Age", particularly those of a science fiction inclination. The idea of exploring space, near and far, still has great appeal for me.
That said, flinging people around the solar system in rockets is completely impractical. There's so much we can learn with unmanned probes; the logistics are much simpler; and it's far, far cheaper.
The only real value I see to sending people out of Earth orbit is for eventual colonization--if nothing else, we can't live here forever. But were a long way off from being able to have a long-term, self-sustaining living environment outside of our atmosphere.
Of course, this will all be much easier when we're immortal cyborgs. ;-)
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I like seeing leadership based upon rational analysis, and not just on what makes for a good sound bite.
And the overall NASA budget goes up - so I do expect cool things.
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Oh look... livejournal...
I grew up with a romanticized view of the space program, which I suppose is true of a lot kids who grew up in the "Space Age", particularly those of a science fiction inclination. The idea of exploring space, near and far, still has great appeal for me.
That said, flinging people around the solar system in rockets is completely impractical. There's so much we can learn with unmanned probes; the logistics are much simpler; and it's far, far cheaper.
The only real value I see to sending people out of Earth orbit is for eventual colonization--if nothing else, we can't live here forever. But were a long way off from being able to have a long-term, self-sustaining living environment outside of our atmosphere.
Of course, this will all be much easier when we're immortal cyborgs. ;-)
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