NPR’s Morning Edition had a segment Monday about the status of the Vision for Space Exploration, focusing on the lackluster support it seems to have garnered to date. There’s not much new in the report, and much of it was based on interviews and testimony from the Aldridge Commission’s final public hearing a month ago in New York. However, the report did include some comments by DARPA Director Tony Tether, one of the witnesses at that hearing, who had some interesting insights regarding why the public hasn’t really rallied behind the plan:
What NASA seemed to forget is that we all wanted to go. We all wanted to go, and somehow we lost that. And until we get that excitement back, nothing much is going to change. Somehow, you all need to figure out a way that we all at least get to go the baby step, which is the Moon, or just into space.
You can see that excitement today with the Ansari X Prize contenders, like Scaled Composites: thousands will be in Mojave later this month to see a suborbital flight of SpaceShipOne that, in many respects, is technically underwhemling compared to what NASA has done for decades. The challenge for NASA is to somehow to tap into that excitement to help promote the exploration plan, something that will not be easy.
I found both that and this morning’s piece quite irritating, in that they seem to be presenting it as all about Mars.
“We all wanted to go.”
This is actually an interesting comment, although I’m not sure how valid it actually is.
Keep in mind that public support for Apollo was never more than 50% until the Apollo 11 landing itself. The press believes that Apollo was universally popular, but that is not the case.
In addition, the Vision has the unfortunate luck of coming at a time of high deficits and a war, which leads some people to think that it is irresponsible.
I also think that the rollout of the Vision and its support has been less than ideal, but I suspect that the external factors beyond White House or NASA control are more important.
Mr. Tether has a point, and I believe it is true that many people who would be _predisposed_ to support the Vision are somewhat unhappy that it does not include more public (and private sector) involvement. But that factor may be getting lost in the noise generated by the others I mentioned above.
It’s certainly an exaggeration, since we didn’t “all” want to go, but it’s a valid point. NASA has never had any program to indicate that they understand that *any* of us want to go, which is what he really meant.
I don’t know how anyone else feels about space travel, but I wanted to go back in the 1960’s, and when space was not fashionable in the 1970’s, I wanted to go when the space shuttle began flying in 1980, still wanted to go after Challenger exploded, wanted to go when the shuttle began flying again in 1988, when the Russians began working with us in the mid 1990’s, and when the International Space Station assembly began in 1998, and even after Columbia meet its untimely end, and its crew began martyrs, I still want to go.
I imagine if it were possible for the general public to go to space for an affordable price, large numbers of people would want to fly into space and stay somewhere for a while to have fun and enjoy the experience.
And I can’t wait till Spaceship One flies into space and into history both on June 21. Ad Astra for the masses! And none to soon too.
It’s interesting that we’re discussing the “I wanna Go” comment in the context of the excitement generated by an upcoming, low-tech private shuttling (up and back). A 17 months or so ago at the Space Frontier Foundation conference in Phoenix each one of us was asked to get up and simply state our reason for being there, i.e, for participating in the whole Revolution/Frontier-enabling et al work. I happened to say that my reason for being involved is really the same as it has been the last 30 years; i.e, I wanted to ensure that the human race got established, somehow, off-planet, in my lifetime.
Leave it to Jeff Greason of XCOR to Keep It Simple: he walked to the front of the room…started passionately spouting off about something I don’t even remember, working himself into a lather..then he finally stopped, and, red-faced, punched his fist at the floor and said:
“I JUST GOTTA GET OFF OF THIS DAMN ROCK!!!!”
Got the biggest applause of the day.
SS1 and related projects, if they become commercialized, will give us some ground truth on how much people really ‘want to go’. It will be useful to have people put their $100K (or whatever) where their mouths are, instead of just describing what they’d think their behavior would be to survey takers.
Yes, it will, Paul, but even without anyone flying, Space Adventures already has many signed up, with deposits.