Hi Guys, First posting though I've been lurking for a long time. I will add my thoughts from a country with no money invested in space exploration (or much else, come to that). I was thrilled to watch the shots coming back from the Mars lander a while back and visited the NASA site every day to see the new pictures. I have little interest, except in passing, in the pictures coming back from the HST because I'm not a physicist but I enjoy reading about the new discoveries made by it and love to watch it go overhead. And fully support the need for the research. When I was a kid I worried about the coming nuclear holocaust because it was in the news a lot but I didn't have many facts. But what I worried about most was the end of the solar system and the end of the universe. I want answers even though I they will mean nothing to me personally. I still have visions occasionally of the sun expanding in a massive red ball and engulfing the earth. It gives me shivers. I definitely want answers. What a staggering feat of engineering it was to orbit that asteroid with a small robot. (Sorry I can't remember names). Now this is real needle in a haystack stuff. I checked out the pictures from that voyage every day too. And then to land ON it. Unbelievable! And gigantic amounts of data. Not only do I want to know about asteroids for the sake of the knowledge but one day we may have to destroy or divert one to save our skins. Now, no one can tell me that we wouldn't know a heck of a lot more about asteroids if half a dozen experts had landed on the one. This is where the shuttle comes in or, more specifically, manned space flight. The shuttles mission is a lot more long term that it seems at first. I dream of us routinely flitting through space and, maybe, time one day and to find out how to do that we have to be up there. It doesn't really matter what we are doing up there. It is incidental, though useful. The ISS must stay up there also. It's not about value for money. It is so much more than that. When the sun does decide to give up the ghost and fry our planet I want my descendants to already be far, far away. I will leave it to those descendants to worry about the universe thing. As far as I'm concerned we have to go back to the moon and then on to Mars ASAP. Then I will fall to sleep easier. Funding should come from the UN so that we have a lot more money and we are all contributing. And I can sit in peace on the beach on North Shore and watch the ISS and shuttle do their Space Odyssey dance through my binoculars. ...Dave... > Markus Said: > But manned spaceflight itself isn't to blame for that. Manned spaceflight > in itself isn't bad just because unmanned spaceflight is underbudgeted. > This kind of attitude is exactly what I meant with my previous insinuations > of "envy" within some scientists ranks. "They're spending money that we'd > rather want to be spending." > ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@satobs.org http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Feb 10 2003 - 10:18:54 EST