Tuesday, November 4, 2008

The Next Space Race

Dan Rosinsky-Larsson

The stunning photos of the earth released by the India's Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft the other day, combined with China's first space walk just over a month ago are bringing several countries into the realm of seriously advanced scientific research. Is this the next space race?



These programs have being gaining significant controversy in their home countries, not least because of the poverty of their citizens. Is it right to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Space when millions of citizens are going hungry?

2 comments:

Brian Dunbar said...

Is it right to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Space when millions of citizens are going hungry?

Do the math - hundreds of millions of dollars can feed millions of citizens for what .. a week? A month?

What do you do to feed them next month? What about next year?

The money spent on Space isn't thrown into a black hole. It buys stuff. It creates industries. Employs people. Creates spin-offs. Which are then used to generate more wealth.

There is knowledge gained - you can't put a price on that. But as a society and a culture we're better off for the information and knowledge bought by the space program.

F. Milton Olsen III said...

The US space program has been pretty much a cover for the militarization of space, and several officials have openly admitted as such.

I no longer support the covert-military covert spying agenda of NASA.

BTW, NASA stands for "Never A Straight Answer."

We don't even own the scientific knowledge we pay for. That knowledge belongs to NASA contractors such as JPL and we have no right to the information as the citizens who paid for it.

NASA "lost" all the original moon movie footage and photos... I'm still waiting for an investigation of that loss, but I'm not holding my breath. The originals are gone--- into the collections of certain favored people, or just destroyed? It's likely we'll never know.