Ben Wetmore

The race against space

Obama bureaucrats have now misdirected space flight in a recent committee decision, pushing it to deep space, 'rendezvous' instead of landings, and aspects of meaningless scientific interest. It was always going to be a true test of the intentions of the environmentalists whether their earthly insanity about 'protecting' the environment would extend even to other planets, and surely, this represents, the beginning of that travesty. Whereas human potential is limitless when given the resources available in our solar system and beyond, now we will contracept, abort and 'control' and 'plan' our way into biological irrelevance. This ought to be a moment of glory for our race, for our people. We can explore the stars, colonize new worlds, extend our people and our culture to heights that previous generations could not have dreamed of... and instead we will be limiting ourselves forever, enslaved to a world simply through our irrational values that elevate a tree above a baby, the wind over history and literal dirt over glory. We have an international space station doing stupid research instead of a moon base collecting tritium to make cold fusion. We have mapping probes instead of a strategy to terraform Mars and Venus. We have cute little rovers instead of intergalactic property rights that would provide the greatest gold rush of all time. Where we need leadership, we have weakness.

Labels: politics, space, theory

posted by . @ 8:04 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

Pointless Mars Research: 2 real goals

Reading the latest Mars lander news, it looks like the ocean theory on Mars is correct. As a country, though, we ought to decide what our goal in space exploration is, either it's to advance 'research' and 'knowledge' as these broad and somewhat vague goals, or they ought to be more specific. Personally I think there are two reforms to our approach in space. I feel quite nerdy for writing this. First, I think we ought to extend clear property rights to space and other heavenly bodies so as to encourage commercial development. Secondly, our national policy ought to include terraforming other worlds as the ultimate goal. Granted, this is a long-term goal none of us would be likely to see in our lifetimes, but as national priorities I think it's ambitious and provides a focused and solid goal to pursue. And if terraforming is our real goal, as it ought to be, perhaps we should be wasting less time with Mars and spending more of it on Venus, which is much more likely to provide a stable habitat.

Labels: policy, politics, space

posted by . @ 10:44 PM 0 Comments Links to this post