The evacuation of outer space

Will humans voyage beyond our blue planet?

E.J. Maliskas [ Tue Aug 30 2011 5:14 PM ]

Atlantis lifts off

Space is still the final frontier. But it seems mankind is no longer going—even where others have already gone before. On Feb. 1, 2010, the Obama administration announced the cancellation of the Constellation program, taking with it all of NASA's foreseeable return-to-the-moon plans.

The final NASA shuttle, Atlantis, launched on Friday, July 8. And late last week, rumors began circulating about the possibility that the International Space Station may go unmanned in the wake of a Russian supply ship crash.

The International Space Station

In the middle of last week, the Soyuz rocket, which carries both unmanned cargo vehicles and crew modules, experienced a booster failure and crashed in eastern Russia just minutes after launch. The failure raised safety concerns and has pushed officials to consider running entirely unmanned operations starting as early as November.

An evacuation of the ISS would mean that the number of humans currently in space would drop straight to zero.

So what do these cancellations and evacuations really mean? Is this really the end of human space exploration as we know it? Many remain optimistic: NASA chief Charles Bolden declared in July that the end of the space shuttle program is not the end of human spaceflight. He was confident that private spaceflight firms—New Mexico’s own Spaceport America, for instance—will pick up the responsibility of taking humans to space and back. NASA has also recently opened their new office, the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, which will oversee deep-space manned missions.

Other groups have embraced the end of human spaceflight and encourage others to do so as well. Michael Lind of Salon.com declares that “if God wanted us to live in outer space, we wouldn't have inner ears.”

Whether these changes truly mark the end of an era is uncertain, but it is clear that many things will change moving forward. The commercialization of spaceflight means fewer scientists and more vacationers; less exploration and more recreation. It may no longer be the international space programs' main responsibility to “explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and to boldly go where no man has gone before”.

Public Comments (1)

- Madmammajamma
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"No lungfish congress would have voted to colonize dry land." [ Wed Aug 31 2011 11:45 AM ]

"Our vertebrate ancestors did not come ashore hundreds of millions of years ago because they decided to boldly go where no fish had gone before. Instead, generations of proto-amphibians in shallow water got stranded in separated ponds. The ones that were accidentally equipped to survive by desperately gulping air survived long enough to breed, and here we and our fellow land animals are. No lungfish congress would have voted to colonize dry land."
Bullshit. "Accidentally equipped"? That seems like a pretty fucking big mutation to have just accidentally happened to a large enough population of early amphibians to allow propagation of the trait.
It's just as likely (more so, even) that it was prey fish trying to avoid predators being chased out of the water. The ones that could absorb gaseous oxygen long enough to make it back in the pond are the ones that survive. Bit by bit those survivors propagate the trait, because, you know, they don't get eaten. Then all of a sudden you have a population able to survive where there is plenty of food (plants made it out of the water first, dumbass) and no predators. Sounds pretty fucking plush to me.
And if we're playing the "putting words in the big guys mouth" game:
If god wanted us to live in peace, we wouldn't have weapons.