I clicked over to nasa.gov after seeing "In the Shadow of the Moon" this weekend. They have some fun animations about the new lunar program.
It's been days since I saw the movie, but I'm still thinking about how cool space travel was. My earliest memories are of the bedroom I shared with my brother, back when we lived in our old house.
The wallpaper was Skylab and all of the other heroic NASA stuff. Science was cool back then. There is no spirit of wonder in the space program. It as though we just gave up.
These days, we ostracize people as geeks and nerds who dare to dream about space travel. I think there is a rational explanation for this. After the Challenger exploded, the world became too scared to even think about going into space.
But I think my fascination with science fiction arose because of those early images of skylab that I slept under every night. I've never stopped dreaming about space. It still sticks in my head that people actually made it to the moon before. NASA even has probes on Mars, and some have even left our solar system.
I think that society needs to focus on progress, even though it is costly and difficult. We can't just let ourselves become complacent and accept the limits. We have to learn how to reach beyond.
2 comments:
Katie thinks that NASA funding is a waste of money, and that we should be concentrating on issues down planetside. "After all," she says, "You can't find a cure for cancer up in space."
Oh, but you can! Scientists can grow cancers in zero-g and see how it spreads, and they can develop treatments and see how they work differently when not affected by the same laws of physics. Plus, they can work toward solving planet-wide problems easier when they can get the bigger picture, so to speak.
Star Trek fanboyishness aside (since I am the biggest Trekkie you can find), space research and development is one of the best reasons to spend money I can think of. To bad it's so damned expensive.
We need more lasers in space.
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