EDITOR: Is President Bush’s vision for NASA and America’s future
in space bold and visionary or kind of ordinary? What is a giant
leap, or for that matter, a significant step? As history unfolds,
it is difficult to compare
“history-making” discoveries or accomplishments occurring at
different ages.
EDITOR:
Is President Bush’s vision for NASA and America’s future in space bold and visionary or kind of ordinary? What is a giant leap, or for that matter, a significant step? As history unfolds, it is difficult to compare “history-making” discoveries or accomplishments occurring at different ages.
For example, it is difficult, if not silly, to try to compare Archimedes’ buoyancy discoveries with the first flight of the Wright brothers. Or Galileo’s gravitational experiments at the tower of Pisa with Einstein’s General Relativity Theory.
So, attempts at quantitative comparisons like this do not make much sense, but how about gut feelings? My gut feeling defines a giant step as one that boggles my mind with its audacity, courage, vision, and pursuit of excellence at the extremes of human capability. I would call the leap from our earth-bound capabilities of the 1950’s to our current capabilities in space such a giant leap, borrowing from Neil Armstrong.
George Bush’s plans to go back to the moon and to Mars are baby steps by comparison. Establishing a lunar base and traveling to Mars have been on the NASA “to-do” list for half a century and they should be done, but they are secondary to the ultimate course of space exploration. Promoting these tasks as our vision for future space exploration would be analogous to Columbus setting his goal as talking the Queen of Spain into giving him three medium-sized sailing ships to fool around with.
We live on a small planet in an insignificant solar system of an ordinary spiral galaxy among 100 billion other galaxies in what has been called our universe. If you believe inflation theory, our universe is one among countless others in a greater universe. To be still fiddling around inside our own solar system to the exclusion of more far-reaching space exploration efforts does not seem very visionary to me.
I spent more than 30 years on the NASA Team, starting in 1962. I was moved and inspired by President Kennedy’s vision and saw it as a bold and righteous mission of exploration for its own sake, even though we did it as a race with the Russians. It bothered me that I was unable to formulate in my mind at that time an answer to those who said we should have spent the money on more pressing needs here on earth.
Looking back I would say the benefits of our country’s accomplishments in space and the enormous social and commercial spin-offs far outweigh what those competing social programs would have produced.
Now again, I’m not sure I could put into words how vital I feel the human urge is to explore our origins, or just to explore the unknown, or how certain I am that bold (not reckless) and visionary programs are the pathway. The program proposed by Bush is lukewarm by comparison.
Roy Guist, Morgan Hill
