Lately we have been asking Alysse what she wants to do with her life. We get some blank stares, and a quick “I don’t know”. Which is probably true, since she isn’t quite 13 yet. But should she know?
I realized that I knew what I wanted to be from the time I was in second grade! An astronaut! Oh yeah, and I almost made it, and then reality set in.
But what that desire made happen was my interest in all things mechanical, which in turn made me do fairly well in math and science. Which means that I can do a geometric proof that proves that everything I have is due to NASA?
So here it is my second blog post and I am already going to say something political. I will try to be non-controversial, and I won’t even mention political parties. But I really think that our politicians are bungling this whole space exploration thing.
My reasoning is this, we used our government to subsidize and make our space program one of our greatest achievements. It inspired me, and probably a whole bunch of folks to want to be astronauts, and in the end we all became technical nerds and engineers. But the return on investment is measurable, in technology as well as intellectual power.
However, our politicians have now deemed it a waste of money. It’s OK to spend billions in military spending to occupy foreign lands. It’s acceptable to spend billions to bail out foreign banks. It’s acceptable to bail out companies that were supposed to be working in the “Capitalistic” fashion, and then these same companies used the money to pay bonuses.
So we are left hitching rides from the Russians, and the Chinese are doing all of the same things that we did 50 years ago. So where does that leave us? What inspires our youth? Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian? Ask these same children and young adults who Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, and Buzz Aldrin are, and I can almost guarantee that you will get a blank look.
So if the fact that we spend more money on subsidizing foreign governments than space exploration upsets you, maybe you should send your congressman an email, and let them knows that we need to do something to inspire our children to greater heights. Literally and figuratively.
The return on investment in as far as the intellectual power of an entire generation (my parents) is one thing (boy have we regressed as a country in that regard) but you understate the return on investment as far as technology specifically designed for the space race and then the side effects of the research. Isn't pretty much every synthetic material found today a by product of NASA research? What could we achieve if we truly set our minds on reaching Mars?
ReplyDelete