Markus wrote: >Please explain and justify the huge amount of funding that keeps going into >other non-space fields of research that have far far less practical or >direct short-term and long-term results to the benefit of people worldwide >than manned spaceflight. Explain why money goes into theoretical physics, >particle accelerators, astronomy, philosophy, art, or archeology. Also >explain what the direct and indirect benefits of such fields are that >render them privileged above spaceflight. Why invest in such fields? I doubt if any of the very worthy fields mentioned above are receiving close to the $6 Billion that is budgeted annually to manned space flight. So the question is the opposite: does manned space flight deserve to be privileged? The late Richard Feynman wrote "In the newspaper I used to read about shuttles going up and down all the time, but it bothered me a little bit that I never saw in any scientific journal any results of anything that had ever come out of the experiments on the shuttle that were supposed to be so important". (What Do You Care What Other People Think?) Investment in very expensive "Big Science" projects such as the CERN Particle Accelerator and the Hubble Space Telescope is sometimes very justified. But it seems doubtful that the scientific results coming out of the manned flight program are on that level and do not alone justify the risk to lives or the cost of manned space flight. On the other hand, if the real goal of manned space flight is exploration for its own sake and developing our ability to reach physically farther into space, why are we risking so much for a shuttle ferrying back and forth to some spot a few hundred kilometers about the Earth's surface? I personally think abandoning manned space flights would be a tragedy. I also think that NASA has done some incredibly fine work. But if it is to be continued, it should serve a real purpose and not merely as a result of the tremendous bureaucratic inertia that any large organization such as NASA can build up over the years. Ed Ehrlich - SkyWatch - The Astronomical Alarm Clock <webmaster@sky-watch.com> Jerusalem, Israel http://www.sky-watch.com -----Original Message----- From: Markus Mehring [mailto:m.m@gmx.de] Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2003 8:47 AM To: seesat-l@satobs.org Subject: Re: Boston Globe Op/ Ed Article On Tue, 4 Feb 2003 22:41:21 -0400, you ("Stephen Bolton" <sbolton@nbnet.nb.ca>) wrote: >Which brings us to reason number two. She is not being unfairly critical >with the perfume and ants line - it was perfume and ants! It is shamefully arrogant to reduce this mission so blatantly to that kind of buzzwords. It is ignorant towards the huge amount of experiments that were flown that went _far_ beyond "perfume and ants", and it is certainly very disrespectful towards the loss of life and the resulting grief. STS-107 was no perfume factory joyride or mini-zoo, and I strongly resent any such comments. >There has been a LONG line of distinguished and knowledgeable scientists who >have repeatedly warned that manned space research is not worth the economic >cost - let aside the human. Why do you suppose they did that? I don't know. Envy perhaps? <scnr> >I have read those arguments in detail, and have never seen them effectively >countered. Please explain and justify the huge amount of funding that keeps going into other non-space fields of research that have far far less practical or direct short-term and long-term results to the benefit of people worldwide than manned spaceflight. Explain why money goes into theoretical physics, particle accelerators, astronomy, philosophy, art, or archeology. Also explain what the direct and indirect benefits of such fields are that render them privileged above spaceflight. Why invest in such fields? CU! Markus ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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