The Final Frontier

Para los que les interesa el tema, una columna muy interesante sobre la dirección que debería tomar el programa espacial de EEUU.

Larga, pero vale la pena.

Yo, desde el llano, creo que tienen razón los que dicen que:

1) la NASA, por lo menos tal como existe en la actualidad, tiene que desaparecer
2) para que tengan algún futuro, las actividades espaciales deben tener al lucro como objetivo

In the blink of an eye, a subject purely in the realm of science fiction became science fact—and a major cultural phenomenon, not to mention a huge government program. At its funding peak during the Apollo years, NASA consumed over four percent of the entire federal budget. The funding would not have flowed so freely if not for the urgency of the race with the Soviets. Had the Soviets been rushing not up to space but down to the bottom of the Marianas Trench (which had in fact just been reached in 1960), the United States would have spent lavishly to get there first. Had Kennedy not been assassinated and had he won a second term, he might well have ended the Apollo program himself as it became clear that we were winning the space race and as the race became less urgent in the face of other national priorities. A couple of months before his death, Kennedy even told NASA Administrator James Webb that he “wasn’t that interested in space.”

And that has been NASA’s fundamental problem ever since. The American people and their representatives in Congress are just not that interested in space, and never have been, going all the way back to Apollo. And it shows in our space policy, which has from the start been confused and contradictory.