The Space Program

There's been a lot of talk lately about the space program, what with Spirit and Opportunity, and Bush saying he wants to set up a space station on the moon and send men to mars. Of course, Bush is proposing something that is completely out of our reach at this point, and to even suggest that we do this after spending billions of dollars on the war in Iraq is completely insane, and the fact that he would actually propose this like he really thinks we'll believe him is frankly a little insulting. But all that aside, I do think that this is the right direction to go.

I remember back in the 60's everyone was in favor of the space program. Everyone thought space was our destiny, and everyone wanted the U.S. to get there before anyone else. After we reached the moon, no one knew where to go next, and people started wondering if the space program was really worth it. NASA tried to come up with some kind of justification for keeping the space program alive, and they came up with the idea that there were experiments that you could do in space that you couldn't do on Earth. That at least gave people who supported the space program an argument against those who said the space program was a waste of money.

The justification for the Space Shuttle was that it would allow us to get into space more cheaply, but when there wasn't enough business to keep the Space Shuttles busy, they sent them up to do experiments, and doing experiments is the primary justification for the Space Station as well. Unfortunately, the experiments that they're doing up there are really lame, and they're detracting from the real reason that we want to go into space.

The same can be said for the Mars missions. There the justification is the search for extra-terrestrial life. This all started with the discovery of a small piece of a meteor, that supposedly came from Mars, and that had some structures that some scientists said may have been some kind of fossilized alien one-celled animal. Then they found some structures on Mars that looked like could have been caused by water. Nevermind that there could be a hundred other explanations for the meteor or the structures on Mars, those explanations don't inspire people to spend a lot of money to do more research.

The problem is that all we're doing here is chasing after pipe dreams. The research done on the Space Station really isn't all that great, and we're wasting a lot of resources on it. The Mars program is also probably going to end in dissapointment, and then people are really going to want to end the Space Program. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the Space Program, I just think we should focus our efforts on what really matters: having fun. Instead of experiments, we should be learning how to build things in space. Big things. Fun things. Things that we can play in. We should build a big gymnasium in space so that people can have fun in space. And then, because we're all paying for this and it wouldn't be fair for the astronauts to keep all the fun to themselves, we should send Hollywood up there to film all the fun everyone's having and make a documentary. Have you ever seen the films they currently make with the astronauts? They're worse than home movies. Good movies would help generate people's interest in the space program. That's the problem with NASA these days. They're not sharing.

Now, there's a practical side to all of this also, just so you don't think I'm being completely frivolous. Even when you're building fun things, you're still building, and you're learning how to build. You're also learning how to manipulate a lot of material, and coordinate the efforts of a lot of people. As for the gymnasium, people need to be able to move around, and they need to get some kind of excercise. Simply running a treadmill is too boring for most people. We need a sport. I'm kind of picturing a large room, maybe with fabric walls like a large balloon, with lots of structures inside, like bars to swing on, nets you can grab, and cylindars you can run on the inside of so that you're centrifugal force will keep your feet to the ground. This will not only give you excercise, but it will teach you how to maneuver in zero gravity. You may not even need to keep this room airtight. In fact, the outer fabric could just be a net. The astronauts could play in their space suits. That way they would get experience on how to manuever outside the Space Station. In fact, I just had this idea, you could put a loose net all around the space station, except maybe where the Space Shuttle or Soyuz has to dock. Then, if an astronaut is working outside the station and comes untethored, he just falls into the net.

And as for the movies, that is in part designed to help us learn how to do something else in space. I'm think both documentaries and Sci Fi films. The Sci Fi films in particular will require the designing of props, which will give us something else big to build in space. But mostly, the movies are about sharing. The Space Program doesn't belong to NASA, it belongs to all of us, and NASA has to put a lot more effort into sharing the experience with us.