Star Wars Goes Into Space
On the current NASA mission, STS-120, R2-D2 and Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber is making it’s first real journey into space. Looking back on movies and television, it is amazing how far-fetched some of the ideas have been … and that are now a reality. Star Trek was the first to have automatic doors, scanning devices, and space travel. Jump to current day and humans have barely left the Earth’s gravitational pull. Yet there has been much discussion around my office on whether space exploration is worth the cost. Granted, the money spent on the program could provide everyone in America with free health care for many years to come, but what if we don’t explore the unknown? What if Lewis and Clark said, “Let’s stay home and spend the money on more farm animals and beer.”? Curiosity is part of human nature. If scientist were not curious, would they be able to find cures? There is a great amount of information that we don’t know that we don’t know. Did the queen ask Columbus what her return on her investment would be by sending him across the ocean with 3 boats, crew, food, and supplies?
NASA needs to do a more proactive job of communicating the progress and good that is being made in the program. 90% of the time, NASA makes the news when something goes wrong. Today it is a rip in the solar panels that are being installed at the space station. Maybe the lightsaber is what caused the hole in the solar panels on the space station.
I am still amazed at how clear the pictures are from the APOD website that NASA runs. They have some fantastic pictures there. I agree, we need to explore more, whine less.
I’d like to some multinational effort to get a base on the moon. How cool would that be?
It would be nice to have a moon base and I think that the plan is to have the current space station as the launching pad to other planets. Although it seems like it would make more sense to use the moon as a base.
Either way, you could use the Moon & the Earth as a gravity slingshot, which I’ve always thought was a slick idea.