Our fickle fascinations
The popularity of every “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” spin-off imaginable shows how much Americans remain intrigued by the possibility to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Earlier this month, NASA released the first batch of images from the James Webb Space Telescope—photographs that widely impressed viewers (although there were more than a few who compared the latest views of these celestial bodies to upholstery swaths). The price tag for those photos? Close to $11 billion and counting.
The possibility that aliens might have dumped junk on the moon raised eyebrows last month when NASA released photographs of an unusual double crater left behind by something that had smashed into the far side of the moon in March. The ho-hums came when it was later explained that the craters most likely were created by part of a Chinese rocket launched in 2014. It eventually fell from space and crashed on the moon instead of burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere as planned. Of course, China denies this, but does China ever admit a mistake?
Barely making the news was the June 28 launch of a spacecraft called CAPSTONE that was built by several NASA contractors and is operated by a private company, Advanced Space. After a fourmonth journey, CAPSTONE will orbit the moon for six months gathering information useful to future moon missions. The $30 million project reminds us that even with the private sector doing more and more of what NASA used to do on its own, space exploration still isn’t cheap.
Whether that kind of money stays with NASA or is beamed to Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’ Blue Horizon, taxpayers footing the bill should continue asking if manned space exploration is still too expensive. NASA has many missions in which the only human involvement is by long distance from Earth. Should it continue paying steep prices to send humans when expendable machines could travel for much less?
The moon has not been a manned space flight destination for 50 years because the expense of a return didn’t seem worth it. Even now, renewed interest in the moon is based on using it as a base to send humans to Mars. The red planet has become the bauble dangled before Congress each year to entice NASA’s budget approvals. Stretching its spending across more years doesn’t mean space exploration would end. It might take more time, but as Einstein explained, time is relative.