Space Exploration: Is Alice on the moon?
“One of These Days, Bang! Zoom! You Are Going Straight to the Moon, Alice!” This phrase was made famous on the comedic television series of the fifties featuring Jackie Gleason. In today’s climate, his threat to his wife might be viewed as a threat of domestic violence.
Some years later, I remember two of my friends saying that they wanted to be astronauts and go to the moon like Alice. They asked me what I thought about space travel. I told them I thought that it was stupid. Now, decades later, I think that it is an extremely overpriced ball of confusion.
To educate myself on this topic I used the internet and read magazines like Time and Popular Science. The information was easy to get because this is the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and it is a very popular topic.
Let me share information that I have from some of these sources.
The U.S. began a series of scientific missions to the Moon and planets when NASA began operations on October 1, 1958. It is important to recall a few of the objectives for NASA that emerged in section 102 of the final Space Act:
1. The expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space;
2. The improvement of the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles;
3. The development and operation of vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies, and living organisms through space;
4. The preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful activities within and outside the atmosphere;
5. The making available to agencies directly concerned with national defense of discoveries that have military value or significance ……….
This last objective caught my attention. I think that some person or group thought we could win a war by having a missile base on the moon or other planets. In February 2006, the phrase “to understand and protect the home planet” was quietly removed from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s official mission statement.
In one local newspaper, a woman wrote, “I hope we are all prepared for coming lunar wars and after that the Martian wars. For decades we have been afraid of conquerors coming from the moon or mars. We should have realized that we will actually be the Martians we fear.”
Item number 4 also caught my attention. Due to the space race between USA and the Soviet Union in the 1950s, NASA was created. I can’t help but think that part of the $601 billion dollars spent since 1958 was spent because we wanted to be first. Major league sports teams do this regularly. Spending a lot of money to try to be first. Sometimes it works and other times it fails.
Elon Musk is an entrepreneur best known in space circles for SpaceX, which became the first private company to ship cargo to the International Space Station in 2012. Since then, SpaceX has developed a large rocket (Falcon Heavy) and continues work on a crew capsule for NASA that will fly humans in the near future. Recently a company executive said that plans to launch humans into space looked “increasingly difficult.”
If Mr. Musk gets some humans into space what are they going to do? Raise crops on Mars? Build high rise condos on the moon?
Part of NASA’s mission is “To improve life here, to extend life there to find life beyond.” So far I haven’t seen any of this happening but I know that we have challenges here on earth that the $18 billion (current NASA budget) could fund – medical research, homelessness, environmental causes, drug treatments, etc.
As I type this column, images of the Space Shuttle Challenger that blew up in 1986 killing the seven crew members race through my mind.
Periodically, my wife Kyra reviews my columns before I send them in. She encouraged me to put in something positive about space travel. I was tired, hot, and irritable, so I said, “No.”