Category Archives: Technology and Society

Education, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Sending Humans Into Space

13 Comments

A professor says to stop doing it, because it’s “imperialist.”

I do sort of agree with this, though: “Mandel said the space industry is ‘highly bureaucratic, highly politicized, and highly technical,’ and the more she learned the more she began to question the utility of continued manned space operations.”

She’s not wrong about that; I question its utility, the way NASA continues to go about it. It certainly doesn’t seem worth the money to me. But that’s a separate issue from SpaceX’s methods and goals which, unlike the government human-spaceflight program, which is run primarily as a jobs program, are focused on actually moving humanity into space in a serious way. But she seems to be damning all of human spaceflight with the bad example set by NASA. And I’m sure that she thinks that Elon is even more “imperialist” than NASA.

[Late-morning update]

Don’t be a puddlefish:

Business, Economics, Law, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Twenty Years On

6 Comments

I wrote a long-form post at X.