George Bush still wants to kill the Hubble Space Telescope. According to the Washington Post, NASA may instead be told to devote its resources to Bush's Mars proposal. You remember that one? The totally useless harebrained fucking pointless one? The one that'd never happen anyhow? The one that even total space geeks like me hate?
Bush obviously has no idea what useful science looks like. The Huygens probe sent to smog-shrouded Titan--now that was some science! Photographs of an alien shore, of pebbles of water ice worn smooth in lakes of liquid methane...Hints of volcanoes spewing ice and ammonia...Another world! A world with its own chemistry, its own geology, even its own weather. How exciting is that? I'll tell you--damned exciting.
Much as I'd like to get equally worked up about the idea of sending men and women to walk on the surface of Mars...It just isn't practical. Even if NASA devoted its every hour and cent to the project, the mission simply would not happen in the end. Human beings are squishy sacks of filthy fluid, and they require a lot of coddling to keep them slopping along in the icy depths of space. Not to mention all the fuel required to get them and all their kit to Mars and back in a reasonable amount of time, 'cause these fleshy sacks of fluid don't have nearly the patience machines do. The cost, the mass, the limited flexibility, the engineering issues...It's just a pie-in-the-sky kind of idea. Chemical rockets just aren't good enough. Until something better comes along, the prospects for manned missions deep into space will be marginal at best.
That man. I don't think I'm even going to refer to him by name any longer; I'll just call him That Man. He just doesn't seem to actually understand anything. And I mean anything in the entire world. That Man, it has been said, listens to his gut. You know what comes out of guts? A lot of shit.
Posted by aloysius at January 22, 2005 01:30 PM | TrackBack |