Tuesday, 21 September 2010

Keep your feet on the ground. It's my money!

Fast forward a few years. You're earning money... and paying taxes. How do you want these spent?

Education? Health? Leisure facilities? Something to make you 'feel good', such as projects to erradicate poverty in Barcelona? Or better than Barcelona, in the so-called 'Third World'? Which would you go for? Local or global?

But then... what about having your hard-earned money spent on empty space. Black, cold, and uninhabited. And very far away. Would you be happy to have millions... no, billions spent on a space programme? What good would it do you? Or the homeless? Or the starving masses?



This November 1st the Discovery Space Shuttle retires. Many will mourn its passing. Will you?

Maybe you don't know much about the space programme. Here's a newspaper article and also a comment from a rather cynical American on Discovery's usefulness. The video is of the Challenger explosion which killed all crew members in 1986. The first 3 minutes says it all - note the school children invited to watch their teacher take to the skies.

One single Apollo mission to the moon yielded more scientifically than all the shuttle missions combined. Bear in mind the furthest away from Earth a shuttle has ever flown was 385 miles, and that was only on one mission out of 132. The majority of the time it flies about 240 miles high. Gee whiz, that is hardly space is it? 

3 comments:

  1. I think that this accident is not strong enough to make NASA the responsable for poor people, because building a space shuttle is very expensive, ok but in my point of view it's a good inversion.
    I imagine that we all believe this is NASA's worst accident, and I hope it made them double check every rocket that will participate in any further mission.
    From my point of view, the objective of sending a teacher to the space is a very good idea, because it is beacause of teachers that we all know what we know, without their lessons, many of our world wouldn't be the same.

    Lluis Grifols

    ReplyDelete
  2. And if you send all us teachers into space, the world would be a better place?!

    ReplyDelete
  3. That was not what I ment. what i was saying was that its because of your lessons that the astronauts have managed to reach space. So I find it a nice idea to let teachers travel to space (of course one or two, not all the teachers from earth)just to do the symbolism.

    Lluis Grifols

    ReplyDelete

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