does anyone still care about the space program?

besides me? I am still an ardent believer in the possibilities of space travel, but it seems very much "in vogue" now ever since Columbia to be cynical about space exploration. It seems to me that unless we continue our explorations, those seven astronauts will have died for nothing. Discussion, anybody?

...and I think one of the most important steps in that direction is moving forward in a spirit of internationalism, relying on research into areas that will help us here on earth as well, rather than waiting for military applications to push the bar...

They have plans to weaponize, militarize space. Check out PNAC -- it's in there.

The shuttle crash (accidental? or just lucky, those Bushies) provided an opening to deemphasize the shuttle program, which was eating up money. Some of that NASA money can be redeployed to provide satellites over every possible target on the earth, with the ability to zap any possible target within a few feet. Think I'm babbling? Do your homework -- check it out.

shortages, national and international efforts need to be focused in these areas not on space.

on transformation of our energy system. Continued space exploration can come 20-30 years from now once this transformation has taken place.

In the meantime, robotic exploration seems to be relatively inexpensive.

"We need to fix everything here first!"

Y'know, I see that line in all its possible permutations so fukcing often that I'm about ready to start shooting.

The funny thing about problems is that, when you solve one, another four pop up to replace it. Every time a new idea becomes widespread, problems stemming from that idea will also show up. Static communities (i.e. houses, towns and cities) cause sanitation problems. Agriculture causes problems with overuse of land, etc.

This is not to say that we shouldn't stop trying to solve these problems. But there is no reason to not keep exploring while we're doing it. If we waited for Utopia to dawn before we did anything, we'd still be a band of primates wandering aimlessly around the African Rift Valley.

And hell, the potential solutions to those very same problems may very well be out there. For example, there's this bloody great nuclear reactor sitting some 93 million miles away that puts out tremendous amounts of energy. If we could put some type of collector out nearby and then transmit that collected energy back to earth, we could just maybe go a long way in weaning the planet off fossil fuel use in the global power grid....

...oh, wait? Solar power satellites? But that involves space! We can't afford that!

this!

http://www.liftport.com/

Better yet, two or three of those would make not only SPS systems, but some of these a hell of a lot more viable.

Of course, we're still a bit out from being able to get the materials together for a bridge design, but there's nothing stopping us from putting together a pilot project for a SPS...

We went to the Moon. It was a grand accomplishment, something we could all take pride in. The technologocial advances gave everyone some benefits.

I don't know if we're ready to go to Mars. But if we turn aside from the exploration of space, I think we will have made a grave error.

If we're ever going to be serious about colonizing the solar system, we're going to need sustainable closed-system ecologies to live in. To date, there has been astonishingly little research into just maintaining a closed system that humans can live in for years at a time.

The "Biosphere 2" project was a great first step, but there was no follow-through.

If I were running the space program, I would be putting huge resources into building closed systems, and experimenting with them to figure out how to maintain them. The first ones would be here on earth, but I would also be working toward augmenting the ISS to support itself with no need for periodic shipments of food, water, oxygen, etc.

It's called "Earth".

I'm all in favor on maintaining some elements of the space program. Voyager, Hubble, Cassini and the recent Mars probes have been wonderfully productive investments in pure science, and we can keep doing unmanned programs like these at (by NASA standares) fairly minimal cost.

And I agree that Biosphere did teach us some valuable lessons. The most important is that technology and human ingenuity couldn't keep things under control in a small-scale experiment. Given that, why the world should we believe that technology and human ingeniuty are going to fix whatever we screw up in the far larger closed system Biosphere represented?

However, I think the space migration and/or colonization is a chimera, plain and simple. Setting aside the question of how many thousands of ships per day it would take to even keep up with population growth, look at the bigger picture. If we as a species can't get our shit together on one planet with limited resources, what possible evidence would you advance that we'd somehow get our shit together on multiple worlds where resources would be far, far more limited?

People look at the Biosphere-2 experiment all wrong. Even the people who ran the experiment didn't get it.

They built a closed system, and tried living in it for a couple years. It turned out that they missed some angles, and they failed to keep the system completely closed. For instance, the concrete floors were absorbing oxygen, which had to be replenished.

But this was the first try! Since when does progress happen by saying "If at first you don't succeed, declare the entire idea impossible and give up"?

Last I checked, we make progress when we learn from the failures, and trying again.

Personally, I don't like this artificial requirement of "get our shit together, then move out". This isn't some kind of "enlightenment" test that we have to pass before we get to leave home.

I'm not interested in getting our shit together, I'm interested in exploration and survival. We'll muddle along just like we always have.

I am very interested in humans achieving some more enlightenment, and growing up and becoming more responsible.

I just don't think we can afford to put everything else on hold until that happens. We've been trying to grow up for a long time. I even think we've made some progress, but we've got a long way to go, and problems to solve along the way.

needs to be supported and promoted. Space science is no different, but unfortunately manned spacelights and glamor missions seem to get the bulk of the money. The proirities of the space program should be driven by science and the advancement of technology, not politics and showmanship.

Today government support for science seems only directed toward programs which advance our ability to kill each other or to groups willing to pervert science to backup the political agendas of ludites, religious fanatics and corporate vultures.

...after reading what the exhaust from the shuttle and other rockets put into our atmosphere, I just don't know. We gain nothing if we put a few factories in space but eliminate our ozone layer.

There were multiple migrations, and some of them died out when they became trapped by climate changes. They were unable to make it across the barren zones, and their lines disappeared forever.

So, if you consider planet earth to be an island in the middle of a barren zone, I think this represents a parable in favor of aggressive space exploration. And colonization.

When I was a young sci-fi freak I thought it was a good idea. Now I don't, we are ethically unfit. The thought of our species wreaking havoc on another planet and it's lifeforms is an abomination. Unmanned probes in our local system might be ok but any thoughts of colonization should be left until we grow up. Besides, there are so many places that money needs to be spent here on Earth.

Wait, let me guess, we shouldn't go out into space until such time as we've solved all our problems on Earth first, and we're a perfect utopian society like on Star Trek?

Am I right? Am I even close?

(I swear, the human race would be a hell of a lot better off if Gene Roddenberry had been hit by a bus as a young man...)

You mistake me for a utopian, that's rich. Although I am an advocate for the improvablity of our species, perfectibility? No way. Our species is cranky and complex, it's what we are.
The ethics I'm referring to concern our relationship with this planet we live on and the species we share it with. When our species expanded beyond Africa we initiated a Great Extinction which is intensifying to catastrophic levels today. What's past is past, but must we continue this trend until end game?It is certainly within our capabilities to stop this carnage, but for greed and hubris. In the category of hubris I would include human overpopulation, which in the end is our most daunting problem. Until we begin the process reducing human population to a level that is sustainable for all species on Earth and it's resources, perhaps 2 billion, we got no business spreading through the galaxy like kudzu. If we exterminate our fellow sentient species, the anthropoid apes, as seems likely, how would we treat the truly alien, should we encounter any? I would like to hope that we as a species can "grow up", but I have serious doubts.
BTW, I was fairly well read of the canons of SF well before Star Trek hit the airwaves.

Before we can go and do something along the lines of space exploration, we have to stop "greed and hubris." As part of stopping these things you advocate... reducing the population of the planet by 2/3rds.

OK then. I guess I was wrong in considering you an utopian. You sound much more like a malthusian.

though I prefer to think of myself as an advocate of deep ecology. What exactly is so bad about asking our species to live in balance with the rest of life on this planet? Please note that what I'm advocating is the worldwide adoption of a 2 child per family program(though I'm nuts enough to prefer a 1 child scheme, I doubt it's doable). Education, propaganda and maybe incentives would be required.The longer we put off dealing with this problem the worse it will get, until someone immoral and ruthless enough comes along and implements policies sometimes associated with the term malthusian. Please do not associate me with eugenics or genocide because that's not what I'm saying.

"there are better places to spend our money".

It assumes that because there are things that might be more important, that this science program or that should get nothing. I agree we must prioritize our expenditures, but that does not mean we should abandon good science. Too many people who hold this view believe that we should only support noble causes such as helping the poor, fighting diseases, cleaning the environment, etc. and if we put anything in anything else that we are somehow shortchanging these causes.

The advancement of science is one of the things sets ourselve apart from the beasts. We must strive to achieve lofty goals, but in proportion to the constraints of limited economics.

Look first at those things we spend money on that bring little or no benefit, either in welfare or the advancement of knowledge. How much money DO we need to properly defend ourselves. How many failing corporations do we need to bail out. How much subsidies do corporate mega farms need to compete in the market.

How much we spend on science will and should forever be an issue of contention. Whether or not we spend on science should not be.

is a matter of prioritizing. Nobody's talking about shutting down NASA tomorrow. Like I said, unmanned probes are fine, but manned exploration is hideously expensive. No doubt money could be found by changing our spending habits in radical and rational ways but I'd first like to see us put our house in order, particularly concerning population, climate, water and biodiversity.

The final frontier and all.

I grew up during the glory days of the space program, the 1960s. The nine years from 1961 to 1969 witnessed the most incredible accomplishment in history, the moon landing.

This crowning event soon withered into a general apathy topped off by contempt for the space program. How many times have we heard excuses such as "Billions for space but nothing for xyz" or "We can send a man to the moon but can't blah blah blah"?

Tragically the United States disassembled the manned space program during the 1970s, canceling moon landings, throwing away millions of dollars in hardware, and firing thousands of engineers.

I have always blamed a failure in national leadership. Kennedy galvanized the program, LBJ supported it, Nixon was ambivalent at best, and it was all downhill from there.

NASA is also due much of the blame with its single-minded devotion to the space shuttle, an embarrassingly out-of-date piece of space technology. Over the years, NASA has derailed many, many replacement projects.

On the positive side, there have been many incredible accomplishments over the past decades by NASA and its unmanned probes. The crime is we never built upon the success of the moon landings, instead we tossed the program into the trash bin of history.

I believe the failure of this country to continue a vibrant space program has cost us immensely. For all the hype about promoting math and science in our schools, there is little appreciation for science careers. The space program provides such careers. But countless jobs have been lost over the years due to the lack of interest in space. And countless inventions were never created due to the lack of research over the past decades. Plus we lost chances to enhance our national prestige by continuing our successes in space.

Some critics maintain that we shouldn't spend money on space while there are starving children and like problems here on Earth. This could be a valid argument if only there was some degree of national will to attack such problems. World hunger could be virtually conquered by reallocating defense dollars to humanitarian purposes. I dare say it would be greatly appreciated by starving people throughout the world. Of course, this hasn't happened and stands little hope of happening.

I highly recommend the book "Lost in Space". It exposes gross mismanagement, pork barrel politics and political manipulation, and a host of promising projects squashed so as not to interfere with the shuttle industry.

It is sad to look back at the past 30 years of the space program and realize that so much time has been wasted. Fortunately, the unmanned program has provided us with amazing results on shoestring budgets and for that I am very thankful.