Today NASA was set to launch men into space for the first time in a decade. I couldn’t have been more excited than if my favorite team was going to the Super Bowl and had the live feed playing in my office.... See, I grew up in the sixties. All us kids were completely engrossed in astronauts, rockets and space exploration. Today was a big deal to me. Most of the folks in my office are almost half my age. Each time someone came in my office I was met with a “so what” attitude. As this culminated over the afternoon I began being lectured on my obsession. Mostly it went like, “why are we wasting all this money to do what we have already done when we have so many problems here, yadda, yadda”...... So I am somewhat taken back and want to ask. Is this the prevailing attitude among younger folks? Space exploration, brave men and women atop thousands of gallons of fuel prepared to be launched into space is a blasé thing now? Does exploration of the unknown not give you a primal adrenaline rush?
I remember when we landed on the moon in 1969. The then far-left, which now runs the Democrat Party, asked, “What good is this? All they did was spend billions of dollars, and all they brought back was a box of rocks!” Young people have similar attitudes today. They are programmed leftists who see no value of this type of science. They are concerned about climate change, the Green New Deal and socialism.
“Exploration of the unknown”? I believe they’re docking at the ISS. The Intern. Space Station is hardly unknown. This was really cool to await, albeit disappointing (because of the launch scrapped for today). But, the main problem I have is that it’s a coordinated effort by SPACE-X and Musk to show that they’re just as good as NASA. The whole purpose of this is not exploration, but the encouragement of commercial space flight in the future. Meaning: wealthy moneybags taking joyrides to space while there are plenty of societal issues at the moment. A couple years ago, in church, the priest said something about cultivating your own garden, before tending your neighbor’s garden. I’m not too keen about commercial space flight amusement for the wealthy, when the unemployment now is rivaling that of the Depression.
I think space is neat, but also recognize we've exhausted a lot of what we can learn in our limit of human travel. I both admire and envy the astronauts for getting to go to space, but I don't have as much interest in the research done on manned missions. There's also more unknowns than space. The great unknown that interested me personally was the brain, which is why I became a neuroscience researcher.
Look at it this way. There were a lot of collateral inventions that were necessary achieve the maned space projects from the late 1950s to the 2000s and beyond. It’s hard to predict what might be developed to make paid space travel more attractive and safer. I too had a narrow view of this national expenditure in the 1970s, but then I started to see the benefits. This might look like a close ended project, but one of the advantages to have private industry involved, instead only the government, is that there is room for more new ideas for solutions to problems.