Obama right to keep astronauts here (Feb. 5)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
Since I hadn’t planned on going to the moon any time soon, it matters little to me that President Obama has decided to cut back on human space flight. The people who make their livings on human space flight, however, are wringing their hands and saying what a terrible thing it is to just stop sending people into space.
Sending people to the moon was a wonderful thing at a time when it was important to do wonderful things in space. We were trumped by the Soviets in 1957, you may recall, when they sent Sputnik up before we could get a satellite into space, and they also got a human into space before we did.
So, we pulled out all the stops and sent people to the moon, more than once. On arrival, though, they found little reason to keep going up there. The novelty of hitting a golf ball 700 feet soon wore off. The moon rocks they brought back, while interesting, started to pile up on Earth, where they didn’t look much different from regular rocks.
Sending people up in the shuttle was supposed to usher in a new era of space exploration, and it did to an extent. But what really paid off was the development of the ability to put satellites — without humans — into space and put them to work.
The satellites were so sensible, they soon went commercial. They revolutionized telephoning and television; they help us predict weather much more accurately than before; they help us make maps; one of them, the Hubble telescope, is to date the greatest invention of astronomy.
Hundreds of robots, like the ones we’ve sent already, can be dispatched to Mars for the cost of even one mission carrying humans, says Steven Weinberg, the Nobel Prize for physics recipient, writing in The Wall Street Journal this week.
He is right, and so President Obama seems to be in keeping the space program focused for now on what works best.
