have always been fascinated by outer space and the possibility of space travel. Of all the varied classes I took in college, two of my enduring favorites were in the field of Astronomy, and while I've let my knowledge about and interest in star gazing slip since then, I still love to read about space exploration and astronomy.

Logically enough, blog entries on the subject are collected on this page. More recent additions are on top.

January 9, 2004

Bush is going to propose a great increase in space exploration, much to the delight of all Republicans from Texas, where the space industry is a tremendous economic force and huge lobbying power.  It's no accident that both of the quotes by congressmen in the article are from Texas, home of much of NASA's finance.  Still, I'm not going to call the whole thing space pork, since I'd love to see more astronaut happenings.  It's just the little issue of paying for it, what with the economy lagging and Bush having already racked up the biggest budget deficits in world history, and US still neck deep in Iraq with no real end in sight and world terrorism spreading rapidly. Also, it's not as if NASA's done much to inspire confidence or hope in recent years, and the various space shuttle disasters, constant Mars lander failures, and continual reports of institutional corner-cutting and incompetence after each costly disaster.

Engineers would have to build new spacecraft for the trips to and from the moon and Mars. If the Apollo-style mission design was adopted, there would also be the need for landing craft that would undock from the mother ship and touch down to the moon or Mars.

Mission plans, crew size and other factors would have to be considered in the design of such craft.

No firm cost estimates have been developed, but informal discussions have put the cost of a Mars expedition at nearly a trillion dollars, depending on how ambitious the project was. The cost of a moon colony would depend on what NASA wants to do on the lunar surface.

If the proposals for moon and Mars trips come with (believable) talk about reinventing the scientific community and corporate support for space exploration, I'll be much more excited by this.  I just don't see the same companies and people who have created so many of the current problems rising above their track records.  They're slow, expensive, wasteful, and not real successful, and giving them billions more to spend isn't likely to bring massive changes to that.  And I'm not real sure that seeing video of a human walking around in a spacesuit on Mars in about 2027 is worth the investment.

If I were in charge of this initiative, I'd open up the whole process to every sort of new idea, radical or not, with cost and safety and speed considered anew.  There have to be all sorts of independent teams and companies out there with great new ideas, better than the same old incremental improvements NASA has come up with for the past 25 years, but I see this administration as extremely unlikely to welcome any of them.  Especially not with all of the ties to Texas NASA boosting pork barrel congressmen, like Tom DeLay.

In general terms, I love the idea of space exploration.  I'm enough of a SciFi fan to think the stars are the inevitable and eventual future of all intelligent races, humans possibly included.  However I've seen nothing to convince me that Einstein was wrong about relativity and that faster than light travel is possible, and if it's not, there goes the whole fun of things.  I suppose it's nice to think about the human race spreading out and surviving some eventual planet-killing catastrophe on earth, whether it's from solar radiation or nuclear Armageddon or an asteroid the size of India hitting us at 50,000 KMH.  I can't see the current forms of life on earth lasting anywhere near as long as it will take for the sun to go red giant and swallow everything up to the asteroid belt, but that would finish us all off in any event, 4 or 5 billion years from now.

But if there are strides made in space exploration, and say by 2400 or so we have the potential to send huge ships full of settlers off into the blackness.  We'll all be dead for hundreds of years, but maybe our descendents will be in on it, or interested in seeing it happen.  However, if there's never any way to exceed light speed, the distances between stars will pretty well ruin the whole fun of it.

I don't think that space exploration will never be anything like it is in scifi; even if they do someday discover some sort of suspended animation sleeping technique that would allow people to survive the hundred+ year trips to any nearby, hospitable planets, by the time they arrived everyone alive when they left would be dead, and anyway, no one on earth would ever know how it turned out, with no way to send back a message in time for anyone to care.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.