Obama wants to shoot for the moon, and I don’t care.
There is no second space race to the moon. We won. It’s over. We’ve been there and back. Guess what? There’s nothing there.
This is so hard to come to grips with as someone who was born in the mid-60s and one of my first memories is watching the first man land on the moon. I had NASA-everything a child could have from pajamas, toys and an Apollo tent that I slept in.
Sure, back then there were calls for fixing problems at home instead of going to the moon…listen to Whitey On The Moon for a good laugh sometime, but there were a lot of really great things that came out of it in terms of everyday technology.
However, a return to the moon today wouldn’t bring about the same technological advances. We’re not going to advance in computers, engineering, etc… because we already have computers in our cell phones that are orders of magnitude more powerful than the computers used for the moon landings. Going to the moon would be a huge drain of resources and all we could hope for in return is better quality video this time.
There will come a time when we have the resources to go deeper and more substantially into space. But we’re far behind in developing those resources.
We’d be far better off taking the benefits from the space program and applying them not so much on “exploring Earth” which was the catch phrase of the 80s, but rather improving Earth.
The goals we should be reaching for are:
Fuel, Food, Medicine, Human Rights, Peace, etc…
These goals aren’t all mutually exclusive, and certainly not all mutually exclusive to space exploration. However, when it comes to fuel technologies, there would be a drain of resources in some areas, and thus, I’d much rather see us focus and prioritize on what would make things better for all of us.
