Warp Speed
So the space shuttle Atlantis landed safely and if you followed the news coverage of this last venture in space you can just catch the hint of disappointment. Explosions are page one news all week long. A successful mission is something to bury halfway through the paper, on a page covered almost entirely with advertisement.
Part of the problem, I think, is that space exploration has failed to live up to the science fiction hype. We don't have a space navy out conquering alien civilizations. We do not zoom across the galaxy at multiples of the speed of light (or even fractions of the speed of light for that matter). The aliens haven't landed just to say hi. I don't have a jetpack in my garage. No one has degrees in xeno biology or xeno linguistics. Even Mars turned out to be a mostly red dry place.
Another major problem is image. The early space program had guys strapped into a capsule at the top of a giant missile looking set of boosters. That is a pretty darn cool look. The shuttle looks like some over sized freight plane. You expect the middle hatch to open up and out comes some rail care looking parcel. "Your oxygen supply is here mister astronaut, please sign after the X." These are vehicles built on a design that is over twenty years old. Car design changes from year to year, and we just use those to move around on the planet. No people want to see the curvey sexy space ships they were promised over and over again during the Golden age of Science Fiction. (Not so much by the authors but by the guys who painted the covers for their books). Sure a monster space ship with pointless curves and lots of shiny bits probably isn't very practical from an engineering standpoint, but think of the marketing opportunity.
We can sell all the religious folk on the need to spread the human race beyond the galaxy. We can sell all the liberal type folk on the opportunity to do great science that will benefit all of man kind (exactly what that science would be, I have I no idea. We would have paid geeks for that kind of stuff). The real selling point would have to be that the space ship would be a money maker. It is the only way it could possibly work in this day and age. People are just tired of paying taxes for things they aren't getting immediate tangible results from. We will throw tons of money at biological research because every day some drug company or research hospital is coming up with yet another way to improve our health for longer periods, but sending yet another shuttle up to an international space station that few people know much about, doesn't have that same appeal. No this new ship needs to do something like mine asteroids or take extremely wealth folks on more than just a quick orbit around the planet. It needs to be like a solar system cruise ship.
So anyway, I'm glad the astronauts are back safely, but it is really telling that I have no clue who they are. NASA needs to do something about that.
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Part of the problem, I think, is that space exploration has failed to live up to the science fiction hype. We don't have a space navy out conquering alien civilizations. We do not zoom across the galaxy at multiples of the speed of light (or even fractions of the speed of light for that matter). The aliens haven't landed just to say hi. I don't have a jetpack in my garage. No one has degrees in xeno biology or xeno linguistics. Even Mars turned out to be a mostly red dry place.
Another major problem is image. The early space program had guys strapped into a capsule at the top of a giant missile looking set of boosters. That is a pretty darn cool look. The shuttle looks like some over sized freight plane. You expect the middle hatch to open up and out comes some rail care looking parcel. "Your oxygen supply is here mister astronaut, please sign after the X." These are vehicles built on a design that is over twenty years old. Car design changes from year to year, and we just use those to move around on the planet. No people want to see the curvey sexy space ships they were promised over and over again during the Golden age of Science Fiction. (Not so much by the authors but by the guys who painted the covers for their books). Sure a monster space ship with pointless curves and lots of shiny bits probably isn't very practical from an engineering standpoint, but think of the marketing opportunity.
We can sell all the religious folk on the need to spread the human race beyond the galaxy. We can sell all the liberal type folk on the opportunity to do great science that will benefit all of man kind (exactly what that science would be, I have I no idea. We would have paid geeks for that kind of stuff). The real selling point would have to be that the space ship would be a money maker. It is the only way it could possibly work in this day and age. People are just tired of paying taxes for things they aren't getting immediate tangible results from. We will throw tons of money at biological research because every day some drug company or research hospital is coming up with yet another way to improve our health for longer periods, but sending yet another shuttle up to an international space station that few people know much about, doesn't have that same appeal. No this new ship needs to do something like mine asteroids or take extremely wealth folks on more than just a quick orbit around the planet. It needs to be like a solar system cruise ship.
So anyway, I'm glad the astronauts are back safely, but it is really telling that I have no clue who they are. NASA needs to do something about that.
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posted by Rich Rosenthal II at 2:37 AM
2 Comments:
And why can't I get any Tang around here?!
the Future never looked as good as during the Golden Age of (even if sometimes replete with sketchy undertones). Where are my foxy alien vixens, hover-anything, ethically troubled robot henchmen, and absurdly proportioned ray guns?
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