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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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20 January 2005 - 9:43 am
I'm fairly certain the space shuttle will never fly again and I've begun to wonder why we haven't used the past two years to develop a newer, better space flight system. Surely we've learned enough during the 30 years since the shuttle was designed to come up with something a bit less brittle and a bit more reusable.
I come into this with some bias. I may be the only person in the country who was in favor of Bush's proposal to send humans to Mars in the near future. (However, I think we weren't being ambitious enough. We went from essentially no space program to sending men to the moon in 8 years. Surely, given our advances in technology, eight or nine or ten years should be more than enough time to get the infrastructure in place to send astronauts to Mars. Further, setting near-term artificial deadlines is how you get things done. Setting a 20-year timetable is pretty much a guarantee that nothing is going to happen; funding and personnel will change and the goal will be lost or forgotten.) I like the idea of pushing forward on space exploration if only because we don't know how to do it. Having a pie-in-the-sky target with a huge budget is, in my opinion, a successful technique for advancing our scientific and engineering knowledge. Our space program has been riding on the coattails of the scientists and engineers who worked at NASA in the '60s and '70s for too long and it seems like its time to start over.
Posted by on 20 January 2005 at 9:43 AM
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