Neil deGrasse Tyson's Call for Doubled NASA Budget

     Our in-class discussion of space exploration and Angle of Attack reminded me of an article on The Atlantic's website that was published back in March. Neil deGrasse Tyson went on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in late February and made a case for doubling NASA's budget to one percent of the federal budget, which he termed "a penny on the dollar". His interview made its rounds in many Facebook circles that I belong to. When they watched the interview, my friends (science geeks, all of them) cheered him on, thoughtlessly so in my opinion, so I found an article to contradict them. The article on The Atlantic touches on what we discussed in class about the future role of private companies such as Virgin Galactic and Space X in space exploration. With a moratorium on regulation of commercial spaceflight extended to 2015 back in February, the future of manned space exploration was looking bright for private companies (and it continues to look that way, no doubt).

     I think Tyson has point when he explains what an economic driver NASA's Apollo-era budget was, because it inspired popular culture and generations of scientists and engineers, but with the current state of the US budget Tyson's call for funding is impractical. Tyson said in another interview that "(e)conomic drivers don't need justification". When privately funded projects can accomplish a feat to inspire a similar popular reaction to that of Apollo and which need not be paid for in future decades by US taxpayers, a revival of NASA's former glory seems almost silly to me.

Sources:
The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/neil-degrasse-tyson-is-wrong-about-nasa/254059/
The Daily Show: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-february-27-2012/neil-degrasse-tyson
 

Ethics of Manned Mars Mission

     In an opinion piece for the BBC, Dr. Alexander Kumar questions whether humans are worthy enough of a manned mission to Mars. Dr. Kumar, at the time of writing stationed at Concordia station in Antarctica, where conditions are as close to an extraterrestrial environment as any on Earth, reflects on the approaches to Antarctic exploration taken by explorers such as Shackleton and Scott. Scott, in his last diary entry before his death during the race to the South Pole, wrote, "For God's sake look after our people." Living on a planet that suffers continual environmental abuse at human hands, is our species ready to explore and colonize Mars? Terraforming Mars may just give humans an avenue of escape when Earth becomes inhospitable, though it becomes increasingly important that we stop to consider the damage we do to our own planet.

     I think that Dr. Kumar's ethical evaluation of Mars exploration is completely impractical. I think that the human population has grown too huge for us as a species to actively desist from polluting our environment. If Mars will provide humans with an avenue of escape when an extinction event occurs on Earth, then so be it that we will take advantage of it. In history, when have explorers ever thought themselves unworthy of taking advantage of their discoveries? The tide of humanity cannot be stopped, and it will be heading for Mars soon enough. Dr. Kumar refers to HG Wells and his stories of humans "spoiling" other planets by bringing germs and other foreign contaminants from Earth. I think it impossible to prevent spoiling just as it is impossible to, say, build a machine that is one hundred percent efficient.



Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19666057