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3 Comments
ken anthony wrote:
Not to worry, the Chinese can fake divert 'em.
Carl Pham wrote:
Not under current NASA management? Boy are you optimistic, Rand.
I don't think it's going to happen in the lifetime of anyone over age 10. This American generation is going to beggar itself "healing the planet." Think Johnson's Great Society, writ large, a futile squander of social resources on a scale so staggering it hasn't been seen since a squalid religion-crazed Middle Ages Paris poured the wealth and lives of its citizens into building Gothic cathedrals instead of the sewers and a clean disease-free water supply the Romans would have built.
Meanwhile the Europeans are prostrated by the soul-sapping rot of socialism and demographic decline, and the Chinese are far too cynical (and have a demographic time bomb to deal with themselves). Who's left?
In my view the real issue is whether asteroid information has any value. If so, then a case could be made for a private company to invest in the equipment to provide that data which could be sold to institutions and other interested parties at a price. So far, real knowledge of what space looks like between the Sun and the Asteroid Belt seems to be more of a 'nice to have' than a 'must know'. That this one came so close with so little warning seems to me to be a clarion call that we need to map out all of the small bodies, Sunward as well as starward. I am sick and tired of hearing about these blindsiders coming out of the Sun and we didn't know about them. If I thought we were at a point where it might actually become an issue I might dust off my old idea of putting an instrument package at EML-1 to do an all-sky survey over the course of each month, even Sunward. But I don't think we're quite there yet, unfortunately. If only NASA had a strategic roadmap...
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This page contains a single entry by Rand Simberg published on October 10, 2008 1:46 PM.
Not to worry, the Chinese can fake divert 'em.
Not under current NASA management? Boy are you optimistic, Rand.
I don't think it's going to happen in the lifetime of anyone over age 10. This American generation is going to beggar itself "healing the planet." Think Johnson's Great Society, writ large, a futile squander of social resources on a scale so staggering it hasn't been seen since a squalid religion-crazed Middle Ages Paris poured the wealth and lives of its citizens into building Gothic cathedrals instead of the sewers and a clean disease-free water supply the Romans would have built.
Meanwhile the Europeans are prostrated by the soul-sapping rot of socialism and demographic decline, and the Chinese are far too cynical (and have a demographic time bomb to deal with themselves). Who's left?
In my view the real issue is whether asteroid information has any value. If so, then a case could be made for a private company to invest in the equipment to provide that data which could be sold to institutions and other interested parties at a price. So far, real knowledge of what space looks like between the Sun and the Asteroid Belt seems to be more of a 'nice to have' than a 'must know'. That this one came so close with so little warning seems to me to be a clarion call that we need to map out all of the small bodies, Sunward as well as starward. I am sick and tired of hearing about these blindsiders coming out of the Sun and we didn't know about them. If I thought we were at a point where it might actually become an issue I might dust off my old idea of putting an instrument package at EML-1 to do an all-sky survey over the course of each month, even Sunward. But I don't think we're quite there yet, unfortunately. If only NASA had a strategic roadmap...