Yeah, we Marylanders are so liberal we are pushing to kick out a CONNECTICUT senator. I’ll be sure to vote against him whenever he moves down here.

Hardly original. The Democrats have had that same “dream” for 40 years. (You even quote Kennedy’s absurdist rhetoric about doing things not because they’re cheap but because they’re expensive.) So have the Republicans.

The “dream” of using NASA money to buy votes in the general election is why NASA has made so little progress in opening the frontier. NASA will continue to go downhill, as long as the two parties continue to regard space as just another welfare program and support expensive solutions just “because they are hard.”

— Donald

— Donald

Of course, it becomes the natural outcome when a party puts idealoges in power. It is one of the reason I worry about space.

For a uniquely liberal perspective on what I speak, I suggest hear (the section Adapt we must)
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_digbysblog_archive.html#115458086733370974

Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt make similar points in Cernan’s book; there’s really no way to do the amount of in-depth geology (selenology?) they did over the course of three days without boots on the ground.

Exploring The Moon: The Apollo Expeditions by David M. Harland is a must read for anyone interested in these issues. It covers both the exploration and science that was done on the moon with a day-by-day travelogue of exactly what the astronauts did and how they did it. In the process, it demonstrates why so much of what has been achieved in planetary science actually dates to Apollo (the only extraterrestrial surfaces anywhere in the Solar System with absolute dates are from Apollo; all other dates are educated guesses based on crater counts which in turn are based on the Apollo record), and why robots aren’t going to be duplicating what Apollo achieved any time soon.

— Donald

As for the man vs. machine debate, I think it is misguided because both are key components of space exploration. Machines can be great for making initial attempts at exploration, scouting for sites, etc (think of all the good work by the Spirit and Opportunity or the Soviet Venera missions). But mankind does not truly explore unless one of its own sets foot in a new world.

I recently watched “From the Earth to the Moon”, where the last episode about Apollo 17 shows that even for certain scientific experiments, machines are not better than humans. I am certainly not a scientist, but I found the episode convincing.

I also found myself hoping I am around to see humans come back to the Moon and go to Mars

— Donald