Inner and Outer Space

The people who are capable of effectively navigating the bureaucratic red tape of writing grant requests and running the governmental gauntlet are not the ones who can best get to the bottom of the mysteries of discovery.

To even be able to conform to the pedestrian mentalities of the officials who make the ultimate decisions on the allocation of funds require skills that are the antithesis of those which best achieve true innovation and discovery.


Let us take our efforts in space. We accomplished great, even astonishing things in the space effort, which did not just propel us into space, but sharply changed our environment here on Earth. Many sciences were accelerated due to the space effort. But the disasters and blunders have also been great. Just to name a few, we put up a telescope which had a rudimentary mistake in its’ construction, wasting billions of dollars with a single measurement conversion error. Yet we went to fix it, at great additional cost, and Hubble went on to achieve many of the great things originally intended.

We even, against all odds, landed on the moon several times.
But after a few landings, we largely turned our backs on space. We dithered. Our great motivation and resolve dissolved.

Our leadership thought it was more important to stop the menace of monolithic communism taking over the world, by interfering in the civil war of a small agrarian culture, squandering our youth and treasure for a decade. This, and other misadventures in geopolitics became the obsession of our leadership. It was a disaster of great proportions. Today we are embarked on a path of folly that promises to go on longer and bring in its' wake even greater carnage and destruction

NASA, for whatever reasons, became less and less effective in setting appropriate goals. We should have found other solutions than using the Shuttle as long as we have, for example.

Our priorities still need quite a bit of fine tuning. The Mars Phoenix Program has a lot of merit, which is encouraging. We have had some serious setbacks in our efforts to advance on the Mars front. No sense casting blame or nitpicking. The likelihood of everything going smoothly in even the best designed program is not great. And our successes have been brilliant. So our Mars effort is not going to elicit any sour grapes from me. The mistakes and disasters which have happenned can help us if we learn from them. It is only when we stubbornly institutionalize them that they defeat us.

But let us turn to some of the more interesting features of our efforts with the moon, and make some comparisons to alternative goals we might pursue. But before I continue, I would like to open the floor to ideas and opinions from elsewhere. I have noticed that since this blog got started, not much dialogue has been generated on any subject. No curiosity. No opposition. No alternative possibilities presented. What an enigma to me.

There is room for a great diversity of ideas in the exploration of space. We should also be discussing our priorities with regard to how we divide our collective resources between this and our other critical opportunities like slowing the damage to our atmosphere and its weather systems and how to deal with our ocean resources without upsetting them to the point of total destruction.

These two areas are far too complex certainly to be left to our politicians, or for that matter, exclusively to our industrial interests either, given their unbroken record of rapacious profiteering. In truth, the problems cross all ideological divides. It matters little if we are looking at a capitalistic, communistic, socialistic, or other mixtures of systems. But I only digress to illustrate the scope of the problems we must address if we are to survive and thrive as a species, without taking the entire ecostructure to irrevocable ruin.

The central theme of this discussion, going to the moon and exploring the other space frontiers, should all be considered carefully before we consider our multibillion dollar moves.

Please, someone with talent, creativity, and fresh ideas, join in. Or, short of that, if you know someone who would be of value in such a roundtable discussion, let them know that we are here. Or, rather, at the moment, that I am here.

Have we collectively become such a species of spectators, that nothing can induce us to stop lurking, and rise out of our lethargy enough to do something? Surely, some of you know someone of remarkable and unspecialized talent. Please point that person in this direction. I sure get sick of talking to myself.

You need no credentials here except your carefully reasoned ideas, communicated with a certain amount of care.
The subject is Inner and Outer Space. Certainly, given the events of recent decades, it is interesting enough to gather a group of motivated people.