As long as we continue to pretend, or imagine, that the purpose of human spaceflight is to “explore,” we’ll continue to get the policy wrong.
4 thoughts on “Yet Another Flawed-Premise Article About Space “Exploration””
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As long as we continue to pretend, or imagine, that the purpose of human spaceflight is to “explore,” we’ll continue to get the policy wrong.
Comments are closed.
Looks like he got savaged in comments for not making a logical case to connect his premise and his conclusions.
However, I think part of the problem is that the use of tax dollars makes people question why they should pay for someone else to go somewhere, the same way that government involvement in anything makes people want to exert control, set limits, and tell other people how to live.
I think the flawed premise here has nothing to do with space exploration and everything to do with The Church Of Singularitianism.
Slightly off topic, but the Messenger probe orbiting Mercury just made an amazing discovery. Heh. ^_^
I think it comes down to purpose and definitions. The policy will always be wrong without a clear purpose for human spaceflight. Sustainable and permanent human expansion into the solar system makes for a clear purpose around which suitable programs and activities can be built. This particular purpose isn’t well recognized as THE purpose however. In its absence, general terms like exploration get used. This is where the definition problem comes in. In one camp, exploration equals preparation for human expansion. In another camp, exploration equals science. On a dollar per peer reviewed paper metric, it is hard to beat robots. On a number of humans living independently from Earth metric, robots fill a key support roll, but success hinges on humans.