'3-2-1 ... Good Morning Atlantis!' The crew of space shuttle Atlantis were this morning roused by a message from employees of Kennedy Space Center, preceded by a snippet of Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man. The Kennedy personnel took to the tarmac to shout: "Three... two... one... Good morning, Atlantis! Kennedy salutes you. See you back at wheels …
The Space Shuttle system certainly had a long run. A few of them showed that space travel is still dangerous, but most showed that human spaceflight is valuable for space exploration.
Human spaceflight will probably accelerate now that more cost-effective and mission-relevant spacecraft are being adapted for the 2020s and beyond.
If one out of every 70 airplanes exploded, would you ever fly? Astronauts are either crazy as hell or have balls of steel. A risk-benefit analysis has me leaning toward crazy... unless the 200 mile-high club really is worth it...
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of space flight, manned missions to Mars, and Hubble... but should you really risk the lives of 8 people just to fix it? Or should you just build another one? Which gets me thinking... how much is a person worth?
Yes you should, human life is cheap and over-abundant. Space exploration and the innovations developed as a result are valuable. People always forget how much technology in day to day life came about as a by product of space development. Astronauts know the risks, but reap the rewards and do work which genuinely has value. It's their decision to take, not someone worrying that 6.8 billion is about to be 6.8 billion minus 8.
We as a species spend far too much time worrying about trying to look after our rapidly increasing population, and less and less time making any kind of meaningful progress. I'm glad I was born when I was, because I'm not going to be around to see the house of cards tumble down, as the elephant in the room wakes up and goes on a rampage.
If human life is essentially worthless (see "cheap and over-abundant"), then how is space exploration at all valuable? Because if it's valuable, then it's only valuable to us HUMANS! I seriously doubt any other part of Earth's crust cares at all if some worthless skin job ever sets foot on Mars, deploys another satellite, or snaps some close up pictures of an asteroid.
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