From Sioux:
Park It
By Dennis Roddy
Space travel is a counterintuitive act. A creature not originally designed to walk upright doesn't merely become airborne, but loops beyond Earth and, in so doing, somehow finds out more about the planet it has exited.
That is why, with the shuttle Discovery now safely on the ground, its astronauts deposited in their homes and NASA breathing a lucky sigh, it is time to listen to contrarians such as Freeman Dyson.
Dyson is 81 now and still makes the daily trip to his office at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In his youth he devised a plan to launch humans into deep space using a nuclear explosion. He is versed in both quantum mechanics and engineering, bridging the two with an ambitious philosophy that suggests humans reach beyond their boundaries because it's part of being human. He has won both the Max Planck Medal for theoretical physics and the Templeton Prize for progress in religion. Ordinary answers are not his habit.
When the shuttle landed last week, he had a disarmingly brief message for its owners: park it and trade up. He spoke from the same impulse with which a man in his middle years disposes of the minivan and buys a Mini Cooper.
Whim, at least as Dyson describes it, is what can save the space program:
"It should be an international sporting event. That's what it was in the days of Apollo. That's what the public likes. It shouldn't be sold under the false pretenses of having anything to do with science."
The thought of divorcing space travel from science borders on the irrational until we consider that we'd really be divorcing it from the shipping trade. Such science as is getting done onboard the shuttle is taking place in a vehicle designed for cargo transport. The shuttle, when first sold to Congress in the early 1970s, was a sort of half-rocket/half-airplane that was supposed to transport satellites and supplies to low-Earth orbit. Early estimates suggested it would fly on an almost weekly basis -- truly a shuttle to and from space, rearranging the ornaments on Earth's outer lawn.
<MORE>
commondreams.org |
