end of the space age there is an interesting opinion piece in the business section of today s la times thursday april p d i thought i d post it to stir up some flame wars i mean reasoned debate let me preface it by saying that i largely agree that the space age in the romantic sense of several decades ago is over and that projects like the space station miss the point at this time reading for example what s new the weekly physics update we get here on the net it s clear that the romance of the day lies in the ever more fine grained manipulation of matter by which i include biotechnology condensed matter physics with its spinoffs in computer hardware and elsewhere and the amazing things people are doing with individual atoms these days to a large extent i think the romance some people still have with space is a matter of nostalgia i feel sure that someday we or more precisely our mind children will spread across space unless we wipe ourselves out but i think that manned space exploration is not what is exciting about what we can do now anyway let me quote some of this article but not all space age glory fades from view micheal schrage writer consultant and research associate at mit at america s space age won t have to suffer through the angst of a midlife crisis the reason is that the space age is already dead the technologies no longer define our times and the public has grown weary of the multibillion dollar celestial investments that yield minimal psychic or economic rewards space exploration has mutated from a central focuse of america s science and technology debate into a peripheral issue speace is not a meaningful part of the ongoing industrial competitiveness debate our technology infrastructure discussions or even our defense conversion policy to be sure america should continue to invest in satellite technologies for telecommunications and remote sensing cheap deep space probes would be nice too but the ideal of space as a meaningful driver of scientific and industrial innovation is now dead before the change in administrations it would have been foolish to write an obituary for the space age the bush white house aggressively supported the space program and proposed spending well over billion to build space station freedom alone even as he proposed budget cuts in other science and technology domains office of management and budget director richard darman was an outspoken public champion of big ticket space expenditures the reality that much of the civilian space program from the shuttle to the hubble telescope to the space station was poorly conceived and unimpressively implemented did not seem to matter much political inertia and a nostalgic sense of futurism not a coherent vision or cost effective sensibilities determined multibillion dollar space budgets indeed with few notable exceptions such as voyager the post apollo era is the story of the gold plated porkification of space exploration with programs and promises that delivered less for more and more while the clinton administration has kept on the highly regarded daniel goldin as administrator of the national aeronautics and space administration it seems clear that space exploration is not being positioned as either a symbolic or substantive centerpiece of america s technological prowess the space station budget has rightly been slashed space is virtually ignored when the administration champions its competitiveness agenda i wish this had happened years ago instead of starting to happen now says bruce murray a caltech professor who ran nasa s jet propulsion lab in pasadena we ve put off a lot of things we shouldn t have i would rather see a billion nasa doing well than a billion one filled with white elephants
