You can hear the sounds of gnashing teeth and wringing hands. The Space Shuttle is loping towards the sunset, leaving the United States without its own means for putting people in orbit for the first time in a half-century. And the James Webb Space Telescope, the anointed successor to the Hubble, is apparently being marched to the gallows by a Congress unwilling to feed its growing maw for money.
For a generation, this country led the way in both space exploration and astronomy. So it's clearly a wrench to see America -- whose cultural soul was forged by frontier heroes -- giving up the final frontier.
You've read the opinions and you've heard the arguments. The Shuttle's functions can be replaced by private-sector rocketry, so the current dependency on Russian launch vehicles is nothing more than a hiatus, a pause while we shift gears. This assessment, although possibly tainted with Pollyannaish optimism, seems fair.
But the threat to the Webb telescope is more menacing. "Bad move" sums up the analysis of those who argue that forsaking this major observatory will make the U.S. an also-ran in astronomical research.
Understand: the JWST is not merely a souped-up Hubble. It's a different instrument that can truly look where no telescope has ever been able to look before, far beyond the limits of Hubble -- to probe an epoch when the universe was dark. Not dark the way the sky appears on a clear night in the country, but scary, brutally dark... like a cave when your headlamp fails.
The Big Bang was not dark, of course. But the scorching fireball that marked the birth of the cosmos cooled quickly. After only a few hundred thousand years, the very early universe resembled its description in Genesis: it was a dark, formless void.
It stayed this way for hundreds of millions of years -- unseen and unseeable -- until the coming together of clumps of atoms finally spawned the first stars -- enormous boiling nuclear fires, hundreds of times the size of the Sun, and a million times brighter. The cosmos was pierced by pinpoints of light, and has remained so ever since.
The JWST, which unlike Hubble can make images in the infrared, could espy this initial burgeoning of stars and their homes -- the earliest galaxies. It would fill in a major, missing puzzle piece in the history of our universe.
But given that the current economic climate is stormier than Antarctic seas, should we really be spending money on this type of exploratory science? After all, will it really benefit the job market or the balance of payments to better know how the cosmos came into being?
Not directly. But let's try not to be myopic. Understanding the dark ages of the universe may seem both esoteric and useless, but that would be an assessment worthy of a Philistine. The benefit of acquiring such knowledge is both long-term and significant. Despite the expense, this is an investment that Congress should make.
Why? I could try convincing you with the usual right thinking. For example, I might note that NASA research is one of the most lucrative ways your government can spend money, typically returning ten dollars to the private economy for every dollar invested. And yes, I could resort to ever-popular comparisons with other federal expenditures, and point out, yet again, how NASA's annual budget is the cost of one month of fighting in the Afghan desert. You've heard such arguments many times.
But try this: exploration and new knowledge are singular hallmarks of our species. They are our finest accomplishments. When we sacrifice them in the name of immediate needs -- a tactic that sounds humane -- we, in fact, give up an essential aspect of our humanity.
No, America doesn't have to build this instrument. We can let others take the lead in breeching the frontier. That's often justified. But not always, and not habitually. Being an "also ran" a few times too often makes you a loser. Edward Gibbon noted that the fundamental cause for the fall of the Roman Empire wasn't aggressive barbarians or lead in the dinnerware. It was neglect. Those things we don't do, frequently affect history more than those we do.
And yes, funding the Webb telescope will require more money for NASA. Not so much for the telescope itself, but to avoid strip-mining all the other research sponsored by this agency. But just as Cosimo II was right to fund Galileo and Prince Lichnowsky was justified in supporting Beethoven, we should bequeath to our children an instrument that can uncover some of the greatest secrets nature has. Difficult? Of course. But as Edward R. Murrow said, "difficulty is the one excuse that history never accepts."
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The reason I am more rediscent with regards to outer space spending and the some military spending is they are highly cost in-effective. The benifits (no matter how dramatacily romantisized and exagerrated) are exponentialy less than ANY other spending. Furthermore opportunity for and instances of profiteering are ubiquitous in these endeavors.
The cynic in me believes that the reasons I question these expenditures most voiciforously is precisely WHY they recieve such full throated support from right wingers. They are the two most efficient ways for those who seek to bankrupt the government do so.
Spending on earthly infrastructer by contrast not only results in a tangable asset (road, bridge , dam etc.) it also enhances the prospect for productive economic activity to ensue.(tax base). Goal of right wing (as expressed by Reagan) to bankrupt and destroy the government ( "the problem") is not achieved , therefore right-wingers oppose it.
If the popular will of the people cannot be implemented (because right wingers bankrupted the government), the power of the super-rich right wing sponsers reigns uncontested.
countries are old news. It's all aboot Humanity having allegiances to Humanity now :3
Those who are so fixated on cutting are looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
Mix a quart of kool-aid on earth 1 dollar. Mix a quart of tang in space 100 million. Great plan if your intent is bankrupt the government and line your pockets.
Hope (optimism?), the best comfort of our imperfect condition:Edward Gibbon.
We don’t need a telescope to see that we are currently looking up our own backside Seth. When we are operating as Team Humanity, (not long now), we’ll move ahead at a speed that will more than compensate for this brief hiatus.
Do you really expect Congress members who think the universe is 6000 years old to support funding for something that talks about a 15+ billion year old universe.
Do not fret though, the EU, China and Russia will move forward, Planet America is not Planet Earth, humanity will move forward. The US is marginalizing itself with its backward beliefs and governmental structure.
If americans want to stop being the joke of the world they need to stop waving flags and insist on government that works, rather than insisting on their own little pet projects.
Game Over.
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J.F.K must be turning...
The shuttle's done. They first glided the shuttle prototype back in the 70's. The program had a lot of successes over the years, along with some tragedies. Hats off to all the people, and the astronauts, that made it a success over the years, and gave kids something to dream about and go to science class for. But now, it's up to the rest of us, those with the skills and the ability and the means, to take the next giant leap: Space Truckin'.
And it also looks like that worthless government 'that is the problem' and 'can't do anything right' actually CAN do something right?
So much your right wing ideology, when you want to play space cadets, guys!
By the way, can you spell h-y-p-o-c-r-i-s-y???
Finally, NASA (and NACA before it) exist for the purpose of research and development.
NASA is not meant to be a bus company or a taxi service.
Not only is forcing it to be one stupid, but very, very wasteful.
BO did the right thing. Bush's plan was doomed.
Having said, Webb should certainly be funded.
Further, our manned space effort should have one clear goal, and not other:
To establish a self-sustaining human presence off this planet, whether it be on the moon, the asteroids, Mars, or in a giant space station out there somewhere, fairly safe and easy to defend.
Our very survival depends on getting a second livable spaceship, in case Earth ceases to be, whether from internal or external causes.
Running an inefficient taxi service, based on 30-50 year old technology is not research, is not development, and won't get us where we need to go. The technology exists to work in low earth orbit. Let the businessmen do it.
We need to move on.
Since 1980 there has been no vision thing, just that the Free markets, w/o government will solve all problems along with tax cuts... while the rest of the world laughs at that Idea, passes us by with proactive governments and a vision of being the best, that we have lost....
Being second is now OK, being 10th is OK, being 20th is Ok, being 30th is Ok, or 37th or 51st is OK..
As a person who worked on the Shuttle program and Space station, they were both dismal failures for the most part. The Shuttle failed to be a viable SAT launch vehicle, costing 800 million to launch instead of the planned 20 million and flying over 30 years 155 missions instead of the planned 1500. Neither it nor the space station, more than a decade late, have produced any great scientific results being tenfold over budget.
That said, their cost was small to what has been wasted on foreign wars and bases whose money flows out of the country and fighters that cant fly...
Regards
Obama did not 'defund' NASA. What Obama did do was to redirect NASA away from trying to be a bus company, and back to it original intent, which is space EXPLORATION.
In case you hadn't noticed.
Bush's grand vision of Apollo-on-steroids is what was shortsighted.
Supply-side economics was tried: it didn't work. You have 10 years of experience with it since GWBush, and 30 years of experience with it since Reagan. It doesn't trickle down like you think it's supposed to. Wealth keeps getting accumulated with a smaller and smaller percentage of people and it goes nowhere.
Look at the Laffer Curve. Raising tax revenue only works if you are to the right of the optimal tax rate. That rate is very hard to figure in practice, but there is every reason to believe that we in the United States are to the left.
The government thinks it better to subsidize poverty to try to give them the opportunity to succeed, than to subsidize the wealthy -- most of whom got that way with Government assistance -- who are able to create their own opportunity.
Liberals' goal for the future is not simply to make the rich richer -- which is what has happened in the last 30 years during Republican administrations -- but to make everybody richer -- which tends to happen only when a Democrat is in the White House.