Can you imagine if the National Academy's Institute of Medicine were deciding the fate of our first Great Space Race? We'd never have left low-earth orbit. Jared On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 4:24 PM, Chuck Hards <chuck.hards@gmail.com> wrote:
I never wrote that, Joe. My post was to the effect that discussions about what targets are more important than others in the short-term is pointless in light of a lack of national will and miniscule budgets.
There is a natural progression of where we explore, how we explore it, and on what timetable, but that prioritization is always mucked-up by politics and personal agendas of people on the "inside" and those who want to do things before we are truly ready, either technologically, fiscally, or mentally. We go forward in fits and starts, often taking backwards steps because of the reasons I listed. A long-term plan would help smooth out space exploration immensely. Long-term means more than ten, fifteen, or twenty years.
On Sun, Sep 22, 2013 at 3:44 PM, Joe Bauman <josephmbauman@yahoo.com> wrote:
It doesn't matter what we explore? That's kind of a defeatist attitude, Chuck. The question matters a great deal to people with a burning curiosity to know whether life exists elsewhere. Discussions about probes aren't silly banter. True, we might not be destined for space travel -- in which case the next step up the tree of evolution on our particular planet is a better-adapted cockroach. Why not at least try to learn about our surroundings?
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