Some dissent in the ranks at NASA; the man who led the development of the Apollo lunar module has come out in vocal opposition to plans to use explorations of the Moon as a test-bed for eventual manned missions to Mars; instead, he argues for full exploitation of the ISS and further robotic missions to the Red Planet.
Arguments of this type are ten a penny in space politics, which is a landscape of conflicting ideologies; Moon versus Mars, robotic missions versus human missions, and so on. An essay at The Space Review argues that these conflicts are “zero-sum games”, and a waste of energy and resources that could be better expended by the different groups working together toward common goals. Human nature being fundamentally factional, I’m not going to hold my breath just yet. [Image by jurvetson]
Well when it comes to space I am really conservative. Create an industry in orbit first, mine moon ore, create solar collectors and juice up earth. With the industry base we can build in a single generation we can save the earth (right now, well, earth is dying) and explore a thousand times more effectively by 2030. Who needs a few probes the size of shoeboxes when you can send hundreds of loc sized robots by 2030?
However humanity is not going to make it. If we don’t do space and we don’t succeed in getting a decent singularity before 2030 we are dead meat, stuck in a gravity well mud ball until we nuke or nanoplague ourselves back into the invertrebrate zone.
Who cares – without a singularity I’m dead anyways.