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Wednesday, August 03, 2005If you were driving down the freeway when your fender started to come off and one of the kids managed to reach out the window and bang on it till it snapped back into place, we'd all breathe a collective sigh of relief, thank the good Lord there wasn't a terrible and deadly accident and look for a place to pull over and get the car fixed. And the police would ticket you for reckless endangerment and operating an undrivable vehicle.The space shuttle is not an old jalopy, but neither is the analogy entirely inapt. We commend the job the shuttle crew did getting old Betsy humming again. Further, we think this sort of exercise, scary though it is, is useful. President Bush wants us to go to Mars somewhere down the road. When we do, there's going to be a limited supply of spare parts and exactly the sort of ingenuity that characterized recent efforts will be necessary if we want to get there and back in one piece. All the same, it would be a little hard for NASA, at this point, to bluster, "Yeah, we meant to do that, that's it!" The good news is even as the shuttle program winds down, we've got a whole bunch of private investors looking for newer and better ways to get into space. NASA would do well to get behind them, as well as offering any partnerships the new companies would take. This would give them a shot at getting newer technology designed by entrepreneurs and engineers, as opposed to government bureaucrats and politicians whose interest is not in whether the part works but whether its manufacture will provide jobs for the noble state of ... What the shuttle crew has been through in the last few days is a mess. But we have the opportunity to get something worthwhile out of it if the focus is kept away from political agendas and agency pride and placed on the further development of manned space flight. As for those who would point to this or earlier incidents and argue against manned space flight, fooey. Man does not muck about in this stuff to fill reference books, but to expand his world. The excitement of researching Mars, or even distant galaxies, lays not in being able to tally up what we see, à la the businessman in The Little Prince,, but in truly expanding the knowable world. 
posted by gbarto at 1:20 PM |
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