OT: Re: In defense of NASA

R. D. et al, (* Disclaimer: I'm full time on a NASA project, the IMAGE mission, though my direct employer is Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, who does a lot of commercial space work as well as NASA. My views are mine alone, however, and do not represent company policy nor that of NASA. *) ... so you know which side my bread's buttered on, and by the way if you are a taxpayer, I thank you very much for your support and hope you feel that you get your money's worth out of IMAGE (http://pluto.space.swri.edu/IMAGE/) (you can see data on some of the links referenced there). I've worked hard to make it so. Yes. Remember the photo of the Earth, taken by the returning Apollo mission? Or Earthrise over the moon? That's a perspective that could never have been achieved without manned spaceflight. (I say manned, because no machine would have been programmed to look in the right direction at the right time, and notice the incredible aesthetic impact of that image, and capture it.) Its value is of course subjective - but there's a generation grown now that *knows*, because they've seen it, that Earth is just a big blue marble and not the entire universe. For better or worse, it's a finite planet. Is the ozone hole a big deal? Maybe, maybe not; but we would never have known about it - because we would never have noticed it - without the *global* data that could only be provided by satellite observations. What about global warming? We might have picked that up in 10 or 15 years from temperature measurements at land stations, or maybe not. In any case, it would have taken more years for global climate modelers to convince everyone else that the land data they had, plus limited sea-surface measurements from ships, really did amount to a significant change. Global sea-surface temperature measurements, collected by satellites, provided that insight to us about a quarter of a century earlier than we would otherwise have had it. Same notation for El Nino. Whether we take advantage of the data we have, and do smart things with it, is an open question, but we would not even have the options, in those cases, without spaceflight. There are similar arguments for land-use patterns, deforestation, pollution (airborne and water-borne) plumes, etc etc etc. Not that the data *could* not be collected without spacecraft - but that it would have been a lot harder and more expensive and in most cases *would* not have been done. We know our terrestrial problems better because of space activities. Communications satellites carry WWF, so maybe I shouldn't bring those up, .... oh heck yes I should. Living in North America, I can watch NHK news live broadcasts from Japan (for example). Is that a cultural benefit? You bet. I can see, and hear (and heck, maybe one day even understand) what's being thought and done about problems I don't even have (earthquakes? volcanoes? not in Texas), half a big blue marble away. Cultures I would never know existed are as close as a twist of a knob. Sure, some of that could be done with undersea lines - but not as soon and not as cheaply as with a satellite link. As for the Columbus argument ... I'm always nervous about that one. For me as a born Texan, descended of Germand and English settlers, heck yeah it was great that Isabella hocked her jewelry to pay for that expedition. As a Spaniard, I'd probably be a bit less enthusiastic; I mean looking at Spain now, it didn't do them much good in the long term. As a native American, I'd be pretty bummed about it - why didn't the silly Europeans stay over there and pave Europe? Depends on your perspective. But what I do think Spain bought for Columbus' trip, and was cheap at the price, and what I think NASA has bought for us and was *incredibly* cheap at the price, is potential. We know we *can* build solar power satellites and beam microwave energy to Earth to supply electricity for our classic computers :-) without contributing (as much) to global warming. We know we can put long-term facilities in low Earth orbit for medical reasons or biomedical research or crystallography or whatever. We know we can put people on the Moon and bring them home intact. We know we can go to Mars and colonize it, if we choose to. Those options are expensive, and some of them may not be worth it - it's a choice we have to make. But the fact that we *have* the choice is worth a lot to us as a nation, or as a species. - Mark