Alphecca

What I'm Reading...

After several years, I decided to give a closer reading to Robert Zubrin's The Case For Mars, a truely visionary book. If the boneheads at NASA and Congress had followed Zubrin's "Mars Direct" plan when he released it, and if we had a President with a sense of destiny and vision who had pushed for it, we would be landing men and women on Mars in a year or two.

His plan used current technology and cost less then we're spending in Iraq every few weeks. In fact, it would have cost about 10% of NASA's budget in 1996. We're talking 30-45 billion dollars total over 10 years which, while not insignificant, is a drop in the bucket compared to the total yearly budget.

Of course, there would always be whiny special interest groups that would say that the money could better be used by useless programs that are already overfunded.

I really believe that Americans have lost the drive to scale new heights, to explore and push out our boundaries. As Zubrin says in the preface:

The time has come for America to set itself a bold new goal in space. The recent celebrations of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Apollo Moon landings have reminded us of what we as nation once accomplished, and by so doing have put the question to us: Are we still a nation of pioneers? Do we choose to make the efforts requiered to continue as the vanguard of human progress, a people of the future, or will we allow ourselves to be a people of the past, one whose accomplishments are celebrated only in museums?

We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win. . . . This is in some measures an act of faith and vision, for we do not know what benefits await us. . . . But space is there and we are going to climb it.