If Man Should Invade Space!

Thanks to reddit, I ran across the above, a great illustration/inforgraphic from a children's encyclopeida ('Our Wonder World') in 1918.  Just click the image for a larger view.

'A race for sun, moon, and planets at the terrific speed of two miles a minute!'

My Favorite blurb: 'Mercury: 54 years.  News of Lincoln's Death due there soon.'

These kinds of pics are great fun, but I think they also serve two important purposes:

1) It reminds us that what may seem impossible today may not seem so insurmountable in the future.   In 1918, any mechanical vehicle traveling at two miles a minute (120 mph) that wasn't plummeting out of the sky would seem utterly astounding and just barely in the realm of the possible.  Yet today, almost any mundane road vehicle can achieve that speed.

We reached the Moon in 3 days, not 83.  The Voyager 2 probe reached Neptune in 12 years, not 2,571.

Millions of years to the stars?  By our best estimates using realistic technology we now have that down to merely a few tens of thousands of years.  Ninety four years from now, the time between that encyclopedia and us, who knows what it will be?  Perhaps they will look back on what we write today,a nd chuckle at how limited our thinking could be at times.

2) It reminds us just how awesome the world we live in can be.

We take a lot of things for granted.  We get so caught up in our every day struggles and work and problems that we forget to take in the wonders of the world around us.  Space travel and probes to other planets and computers and intercontinental jets and so on seems pretty mundane to us nowadays.

But I can imagine taking a ten year old boy who may have read that old encyclopedia in 1918 and showing him all the things we take so for granted to day.  He would be utterly astonished and overcome with wonder.  Real pictures of other worlds!  Airplanes that can fly faster than sound! Thinking machines!  Wireless telegraphs that can talk around the world!

We would complain that men haven't walked on the Moon in 40 years.  He would be have trouble just getting his head around the fact that men walked on the moon at all.  We may be inconvenienced by technical difficulties with our computerized communication networks; he would be amazed that we even had such a thing to be inconvenienced by it in the first place.

We live in a world full of wonders that would utterly astonish almost every generation that came before us.  I think sometimes we just need to step back, take a deep breath, and realize just how awesome that is.

Swimming Pools...On The MOOOOON!

I was putting together ideas for a new scifi story and one element kind of threw me...how would open water, like say in a swimming pool, act on the Moon? I read up a lot on different science subjects, but I'm no expert on fluid dynamics or low gravity physics. So I posed the question to Reddit's Scifi Board, and got a lot of great responses.

Some interesting conclusions from the responses, summarized here:

-- Without so much gravity pulling on the water, intermolecular attraction plays a bigger role in how the water behaves. For example, surface tension would create a meniscus (basically a broad hump of water) in the middle of the pool. It may be possible to over fill the pool by an inch or so, as the meniscus would 'suck' the excess water into the middle of the pool.

-- When you got out of the water, much more water would cling to you. As one commenter pointed out, it could be a liter worth of the stuff. So just toweling off might not be enough if you bathed or went for a swim--you may need to scrape off the excess water first.

-- Waves would propagate much higher than Earth. You cannonball into a lunar swimming pool, instead of foot-tall waves, you'd create a mini tsunami with maybe 5-6 foot waves. Splash fights could become truly epic. It seems to me that the sides of swimming pools would actually have to be high, sloping, and segmented it order to break up possible high rogue waves and prevent a lot of spillover.

-- The waves and water motion would move slower than they would on Earth, though, seeming to go in slow motion. Just as astronauts hopping on the moon seem to move slowly because they 'float' downward, it would be the same with the water motion because of the lesser gravity.

-- Stunt swimming and diving could also become truly epic,as you'd be able to swim and jump and dive in the water like a dolphin.

Just some interesting stuff to contemplate. Maybe someday our children or grandchildren or great grandchildren will actually see some of this for real, when they vacation on colonies on the Moon...

600 Million Tons Of Lunar Ice

Recent data analysis from India's Chandrayaan-1 probe has confirmed the presence of water ice in craters near the Moon's poles. The full article can be found HERE on NASA's main website.

If their estimation techniques are correct, the scientists estimate there being at least 600 million metric tons of water ice in the lunar polar region. That is of course spectacularly good news for future bases, and further into the future, colonies, on Earth's natural satellite. That much ice, combined with careful recycling and management, could both provides water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for manned endeavors there for many decades.

And of course, ironically, this comes on the heels of the Obama administration killing off any prospect for returning to the Moon in the short term. We can now see much more clearly how feasible a long-term manned presence on the Moon can be, only to have the prospect of establishing such an outpost pushed out of our reach to at least until the mid-2020s. Its not that the other projects the new administration want to pursue aren't worth doing, but actually opening up a brand new world to humanity would seem to be the better choice of a long range goal, in my opinion.

Oh well. One thing I should suggest to NASA (not that i think anyone there will actually read this): as long as you're underwriting various private space endeavors and X-prize like contests, how about underwriting a sample-return mission for the lunar ice? We can learn definitively what's in it and probably how it was formed. plus the mission may just help to scout out a possible future manned landing site...

Hidden Treasures Of Science Fiction: Planetes!

(I don't know why I keep putting exclamations after the titles for the 'hidden treasures', it just somehow seems appropriate.)

Planetes is a 2003 hard science fiction anime TV series that, like Cowboy Bebop before it, is quickly building up a substantial fanbase in North America mostly from sheer word of mouth about its quality. You don't even have to be an anime fan to like Planetes; its very West-friendly, features a broad cast of international characters, and like most great fiction, speaks to universal themes independent of cultural nuance.

The series begins in 2075, when an international treaty organization of space-capable nations (the US, Japan, Russia, and some European countries) have built up a substantial infrastructure both in orbit and on the Moon. The development of Helium-3 fusion, with Helium-3 mined from the Moon, has replaced the old oil economy and has led to a major financial boom among the treaty countries, allowing them to fully expand into space. Hundreds of thousands of people now live and work off-Earth.

But of course there's a downside; all that activity in space has produced a tremendous amount of debris; i.e., space junk. Today, in real life, orbital junk represents a potential hazard to space missions. Sixty plus years from now, its a primary ongoing danger to all orbital activity. So who gets the thankless job of cleaning it up?

The series focuses on a crew of these space-going garbagemen. Called 'Half Section' because they are constantly under-funded and undermanned, they go out in an outmoded shuttle and haul off rogue satellites, old space station sections, abandoned experiments, and much more for recycling.

The crew includes Hachi, the series' main character, who is a young, cynical Japanese EVA specialist. Tanabe, the female lead, is another young Japanese national and the idealistic rookie on her first day in the first episode. The pilot is American Fee Carmichael, a brash, loud chain smoker. System specialist Yuri Mihairokov rounds out the space crew, a stoic, soft-spoken Russian. There's also a small office staff, and they all get their moments to shine throughout the 26-episode run, but the focus is definitively on the crew of the garbage scow shuttle called Toybox.

Planetes shines above most other on-screen SF, both live-action and anime, Japanese or American, in two areas: depth of character and scientific accuracy. The series' great strength lies within its characters' stories and their interactions. As the series progresses, they come across as real and compelling, with both noble moments as well as petty. In other words, they act very human, and the viewer very easily can get caught up in their daily lives.

The series also gives us the most realistic representation of future space travel I've ever seen, and given all the research I've done on space tech for orbitalvector.com over the last several years, that's saying a lot. There's not a single scientific or technological gaffe that I could spot in the series. It is hard science fiction the way it should be, and reminded me in some ways of Allen Steele's Near Space series of novels, which also contemplated a very similar type of future in space. This technological accuracy greatly adds to the series' verisimilitude.

This isn't to say Planetes is perfect, however. The series' greatest weakness is its female lead, Tanabe, who is annoying in the extreme. This is especially true in the first handful of episodes where, as the rookie, the viewer is introduced to Half Section through her POV. There is nothing wrong with portraying a character as idealistic or foolish or reckless, but she takes all three to such a degree that its hard to believe the other characters would keep her around, especially after she deliberately endangers the crew more than once. In fact, of all the characters, it takes her almost until the series' very end to find any real depth. Fortunately, after the first three episodes or so, the series begins focusing less on her and much more on the its larger cast, and quickly becomes much more watchable. Planetes also relies too much on unlikely coincidences to move its plot along at times.

But if you can get past these gaffes, you're definitely in for a science fiction treat. Episodes 10, 11, ands 12 are the series highlight, in my opinion. Episode 10, focusing on Yuri's past, has an intense emotional gut-punch. Episode 11 features a wannabe space explorer from a third world country's humble program, and though he starts out as a kind of comedic character, one can't help but be moved by his underdog determination by the end. Epsiode 12 focuses on Fee and her bad habit of smoking, but her obsession turns out to be an unlikely salvation for everyone in orbit in the wake of a terrorist attack. The last third of the series focuses on a sprawling eight-episode storyline involving an expedition to Jupiter that Hachi tries to qualify for while also trying to deal with a personal crisis. This is in addition to the mounting terrorist plot to stop it. Planetes also has something very rare among not only anime, but just about all TV series as well--a pitch-perfect ending.

The complete series of Planetes is available on DVD, which you can find HERE and other outlets that sell anime products. Select episodes are also available for viewing online.

The Moon Is Off The Table

According to THIS linked article in the Miami Herald, the presidential panel reviewing NASA's manned space flight program has concluded that sending astronauts back to the moon by 2020--or even by 2028--is simply not doable with the space agency's current budget. One of the panel's members, former astronaut Sally Ride, said that in order to accomplish more Apollo style landings, NASA would need at least another $50 billion, money that is very unlikely to be freed up anytime in the near future.

Given the recent financial meltdown, which wasn't anticipated when the manned space program was 're-envisioned' in 2004, this wasn't really much of a surprise. Also of no surprise is the public's desire to extend the ISS's operations beyond the Bush administration's deadline of 2016, which will take a great deal of money away from other manned space endeavors.

I talked about the "Deep Space Flight" option in an earlier Blog, and its just as worthy a goal as Returning to the Moon. But the bad part is we're once again shifting focus for what should be a long-term ongoing endeavor. It is somewhat like Christopher Columbus shifting direction every few hundred miles during his first voyage across the Atlantic. As I've said a number of times before, space is too vast and too dangerous to keep frivolously wasting our time and resources finagling about what direction we should go. If we want to get anywhere beyond Low Earth Orbit, we need to pick a strategy and stick to it, no matter which political party is in power or what the financial situation is.

NASA's Option 5: Deep Space Flight

My last Blog outlined what I thought at the time were the four most likely paths NASA's manned program could take in the coming decades. In brief, they were:

1. Return To The Moon
2. Flight To Mars
3. Space Stations/Orbital Infrastructure
4. Asteroid Exploration and Exploitation

However, according to THIS linked article from the New York Times a panel looking into exactly this issue has come up with a fifth intriguing possibility: deep space flights with no landings.

The panel is calling it by the rather PR-safe title of the "Flexible Path" option, one created as much out of budgetary realities as by the desire to push the US's space capabilities forward. The Space Station is very close to completion, and public opinion is making it very clear that it won't be abandoned anytime soon, as the previous administration had planned to do in a few short years.

However, keeping the ISS going will eat up a portion of the manned space program that wasn't otherwise anticipated, so in order to save money, the panel hit upon the idea of deep space flights for their own sake. Presumably, these flights will do close flybys of important destinations, such as the Moon, Mars, and nearby asteroids, but won't make any provisions for manned landings. The idea is to build up a deep space flight capabilities first as a framework for more ambitious missions to follow in the decades after.

Though this is obviously a compromise solution that will prove a disappointment to many if adopted, it does offer concrete benefits nonetheless. Developing both advanced long-range propulsion technology and the means to create long-enduring space-borne habitats are very important to any plan for expanding a human presence beyond the Earth-Moon system. This strategy would put an emphasis on both kinds of technology, and without having to concentrate on things like landers and planet/moon/asteroid outposts, both capabilities could be advanced faster. Experience with space habitat systems on board the ISS would actually prove very valuable in developing the systems needed for these deep-space flights.

Hopefully, whatever path the administration chooses--either the 'Flexible Path' option discussed here or one of the others discussed in the last Blog--the important thing is that they stick to it long enough to actually accomplish something of value out from it. Hopefully, at least for the sake of the manned space program, we can only hope political winds don't shift too much, or if they do, any new political faction that comes to power will realize the importance of sticking with a long-term plan for space exploration.

Moon, Mars, Space Stations, Warp Drives, Whatever...Just Pick One

THIS linked article from ABC News illustrates why our manned space program isn't much farther along than it is.

Every four or eight years, either we elect a new president and/or a new political party takes power, and the space program undergoes yet another overhaul. Programs that have been moving forward for years are often suddenly disrupted, delayed, or canceled altogether. The history of NASA is literally littered with the epitaphs of otherwise promising projects like the SSTO or X-33/Venturestar.

Unfortunately, space has proven too difficult an environment in which to do anything quickly or easily. Apollo with its breakneck pace of historic accomplishments turned out to be the exception, not the rule. We need long term commitment to a single vision of space exploration/exploitation in order to really accomplish any major worthwhile goals.

Though I doubt we'll ever see one any time soon, what we should have is a national referendum on space. The public should weigh in on exactly what we should try to accomplish in space, and whatever administration is in power should follow that as a guideline, instead of just canceling or downgrading projects out of spite against the previous administration, something both political parties have been guilty of for decades now.

But which general plan would the public back? Actually the best way we can decide this is educating people on the general directions the space program could take.

As an example, four feasible general strategies are outlined below. It should be noted that none of these are mutually exclusive; one can eventually lead into one or more of the others very easily.

Return to the Moon: This is the strategy outlined by the Bush administration in 2004, which NASA had been working toward since. I should note that I was not a fan of many of the previous administration's science policies, but I do think its 'refocusing' of the manned space program was spot on, especially since the retirement of the shuttle fleet was inevitable. The Constellation vehicle system under development was specifically geared for this mission.

The purpose of this strategy was not only to send more Apollo-style manned missions to the Moon, but to establish a permanent manned presence there in the form of a moonbase. The advantage of a Moon goal is that it has been underway for half a decade now and is already fairly well developed. As a result it could probably be achieved sooner than the other strategies outlined here. Also, the experience of building and maintaining the ISS would come in very handy in creating a slowly expanding moonbase. For long term benefits, the Moon offers vast resources, particularly the potential fusion fuel helium-3, that could produce a potential windfall for any country that gain a significant lead in developing them.

Mars: The second most talked-about path, many Americans want to forge directly ahead to the Red Planet on one or more grand voyages of human discovery. It is perhaps the most romanticized of the strategies, very appealing to generations of Americans who grew up on the space exploration adventures of various scifi heroes.

The advantage of this plan would be mostly in the technology that would developed in order to make it viable; namely long-term space habitat systems and true interplanetary manned spacecraft. The human exploration of another whole planet would also be very valuable, conducting observations and experiments that current robotic probes aren't easily capable of. But more, a human being stepping onto the surface of another planet would be a monumental historical event that would resonate for generations.

Going to Mars would be the longest-range goal discussed here because of the immense distances and logistics involved, and could actually incorporate a return to the Moon and/or a manned asteroid rendezvous as an intermediate step.

Orbital Infrastructure: Instead of manned exploration, NASA concentrates much more on building up potentially useful and profitable structures in Earth orbit. This is not necessarily a stay-at-home strategy. Post-Apollo, NASA had a 'Grand Architecture' vision for space, focusing on building up a 'step ladder' of stations leading out into the solar system. The shuttle and the ISS as they were originally envisioned were just the first two major projects of this architecture.

In this vision, NASA maintains the ISS as long as possible and follows up with bigger, more advanced stations, as well as other useful orbital structures, such as solar power satellites, orbital hot labs, zero-g factories, or perhaps even a launch tower or space elevator. The idea would be concentrate as much as possible on making space much more of a money making venture than it is now, and use the built-up infrastructure to eventually build the interplanetary craft needed to carry humans further into the solar system.

Asteroids: Somewhat of an underdog compared to the others, its still mentioned occasionally in various sources. Instead of concentrating on 'major' bodies such as the Moon and Mars, emphasis for this strategy is placed on the manned exploration and exploitation of near-Earth asteroids. Technical difficulty would be somewhere between returning to the Moon and sending expeditions to Mars. And with thousands of potential destinations, NASA could be constructively busy for decades.

This strategy has two major potential pluses over the others. First, Asteroids taken in their thousands represent an immense treasure trove of mineral wealth; an estimate of single typical nickel-iron asteroid from a few years ago put the worth of the asteroid's minerals and metals at over $12 trillion.

Second, asteroids can be made mobile using even today's technology. It would be a very slow and gradual process, but valuable asteroids can be 'herded' closer to Earth, inserted either into an L4 or L5 Lagrange point or into Lunar orbit, where they can be much more easily studied and harvested. Hollowed asteroids also offer ready-made armor against radiation and impact hazards in space, and small, properly hollowed and modified asteroids could serve as the chasis fo interplanetary craft.

Which strategy would be best? That would depend on the goals people wanted to accomplish. All have advantages that could benefit not juts the US, but the world beyond as well. However, if we want to see any of these objectives succeed in our lifetimes, we have to pick one and stick with it.

Our Near Space Future

(Image courtesy NASA)

Many people today will be pontificating about the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, as is only right. But I'd like to take the opportunity not to talk about the last forty years of space travel, but the forty years that's immediately ahead of us.

In my last blog entry, I talked about how people have trouble intuitively grasping just how vast the scale of space is. Which is partly why I think that for the next few generations, despite the current push outward for exploration to the Moon and Mars, I think the aspect of space travel that will have the most impact on normal people will be the opening up and exploitation of so-called 'Near Space.' Near Space extends from the upper reaches of the atmosphere up to about 500 miles altitude, or the inner edge of the Van Allen radiation belts. That's a scale well within most peoples' understanding, and still is on the shore of this exciting new frontier.

We're already seeing a number of exciting developments along these lines recently. The successful SpaceX launch, the construction of the Virgin Galactic "spaceport", the US Military's tentative plan for a near space 'stratostation' that could permanently occupy suborbital space. Combined with the enlarging community of space-capable nations (particularly China) and renewed interest by private companies just chomping at the bit to market space, it seems that we're poised for a renewed flowering of space travel and exploration. But this time, instead of just being limited to two competing nations, it seems the whole of the industrialized world will take part.

After the world more fully recovers from the recent economic chaos--which admittedly might not be for a full decade yet--I think space tourism will begin to fully take off, with Virgin Galactic and its inevitable competitors offering first suborbital flights, then full orbital excursions. Bigelow Aerospace is already hard at work designing and constructing the first 'space hotels', which would be no more than small, modular, inflatable space stations in which tourists and small crews could stay for up to a few days. And in their footsteps will follow other companies eager to cash in.

Even now, many countries see the ability to at least launch their own satellites as a matter of pride, and a number of them are beginning to launch their own space exploration probes as well, as exemplified by the recent lunar probes launched by India and Japan. How long before they begin launching their own manned space craft, and building their own space stations?

So by 2050 or so, I'm hazarding an educated guess about what we'll see: many different nations and probably at least half a dozen private companies involved heavily in human space exploitation. Those that don't already have a manned presence there will be planning on it. There will be at least a dozen space hotels, most small, but perhaps a few as large as the old Mir station. Companies will start ofering point-to-point suborbital flights. Russia, always a major proponent of space stations, may have an ISS-like large station, and will probably have plans for something even larger, like a ring station. China may still be playing-catch up, hoping to industrialize Near Earth Orbit, and close on its heels will be alliances and nations like the ESA, Japan, India, Brazil, and others.

But where will the US space program fit into all of this?

For some reason, the slow but deliberate process of constructing orbital infrastructure does not seem to sit well with the American public. This seems to go beyond just its high price tag and the old manned vs robotic exploration debate. I think it goes back to why the Apollo program is such a jewel in the eye of the American public, and why space efforts since, despite their on-paper practicality, haven't been as popular.

I think there's a very deep need in the American psyche to explore. Most of the population in the US is descended from people who left their homelands and set off toward someplace unknown in the hopes of something better, and I think that tendency is pretty much embedded in our national DNA. We love building things and making money, but even more fundamental than all that is that we, as a people, want to go.

Apollo spoke to that very deeply. Man landing on the Moon was an amazing technical achievement, but I think to many around the world, especially Americans, it felt right. Like it was what we were destined to do all along.

But many at NASA, in that era and since, realized that sending humans beyond the Moon would need an extensive orbital infrastructure to be practical. You need someplace to construct the giant vehicles necessary, you need workhorse vehicles to haul all the material to orbit, as well as a place to test out long-term habitation and industrial techniques. Thus the need for a shuttle and the space station, and the other plans NASA had its old 'grand architecture.' This goes back to what I talked about last time--just how vast the scale of space is. We're microbes trying to cross an ocean on specks of dust. With our current level of technology, there really is no other way to go about sending humans out into the solar system without this infrastructure.

In the coming era, I think space agencies and companies may begin to specialize--instead of being a catch-all for all space efforts the way many agencies have been, they may begin specializing according to what they do best. For example, the private companies will be all about tourism, the fledgling countries will want to compete for launch services, Russia I'm sure would love to be at the forefront of space stations and colonies in orbit, Japan seems determined to create solar power satellites, and so on.

And Americans I think will work very hard, as they have historically, to be humanity's great explorers of space, to always push the envelope of where humanity goes and what we go out in the Great Dark. The next great age of American manned exploration may not start until the other countries catch up and build the infrastructure that the US needs to explore but still seems very reluctant to participate in. I'm sure that there will be American stations and moonbases and what not, but the US will not fully wake from its current ennui about space until we once again can finally start taking great leaps for all mankind.

The Public vs the Scale of the Universe

Most people have trouble intuitively grasping the scale of the universe.

Its not that we have problems with the numbers. Most people can bandy the facts and figures around pretty easily. Approximately 238,000 miles to the Moon, 93 million miles to the Sun, 4.3 light years to Proxima Centauri, and so on. Not too much difficulty there.

But visualizing those distances accurately is not instinctive at all. In a way, we're built against that--we have only these analog animal brains of ours, after all. Our minds are hardwired by evolution to deal with things on a human scale, and as a result we tend to mentally shrink everything down to that scale so we can more easily handle it, no matter how inaccurate that view may be.

You can see this popping up a lot in science fiction. The popularity of Space Opera science fiction, for example, can at least partially be credited to how it shrinks travel to other solar systems down to a human scale, with interstellar travel taking days or weeks at the most and entire planets usually represented by over-simplified sets of cities and environments. Space-borne disaster movies such as Armageddon or the more recent Moonfall suffer from this as well, portraying human nuclear weapons as being able to do more than imperceptibly nudge massive celestial objects like the Moon or a moon-sized asteroid. Trying to move the Moon with nuclear weapons would be like trying to propel an aircraft carrier out to sea by hitting it in the stern with a handful of firecrackers.

But I think this lack of understanding scale also colors how the public perceives a lot of scientific endeavors, and usually not for the better. For example, there recently have been a rash of blogs and opinions online complaining about how NASA has waited so long to return to the Moon or to mount an expedition to Mars...almost as if the Moon were right next door and Mars was just a jaunt down the street.

But the failure here is really in understanding just how far away even the Moon is, and how difficult it currently is to send people there. A round trip would cover a distance of roughly 20 times the circumference of Earth. When was the last time any one of us circumnavigated the globe even once? Even with modern commercial jets, how much would 20 such trips cost you in terms of time (both in preparation and in actual flight), resources, and money? And that would just be a taste of the raw distance involved. A trip to the Moon, performed entirely in hard vacuum and microgravity, would be far more difficult and expensive than that.

It was done before during the Apollo program, of course, with great difficulty and risk. But the problem is, we found nothing on the Moon that made it worth the expense for astronauts to return. Its not that the Moon doesn't have valuable resources we can use, its just that with our current level of technology we can't build up the infrastructure there to profitably exploit them. Why? Because the Moon is just too damn far away, and sending things there has proven just too expensive so far as a result.

And Mars is much, much worse. At its closest approach, Mars is about 36 million miles from Earth, or about 1440 times the circumference of Earth. How long and how expensive would 1440 trips around the world on commercial airlines be to you? Now imagine doing it twice, as you'd probably want a return trip back to Earth as well. Now imagine how difficult and expensive a flight that distance through a hostile, deadly void would be in a spacecraft using current technology.

Like the Moon, its not as if Mars isn't ripe with valuable resources and potential scientific discoveries. But we just don't have the technology yet to reach all that distance and set up all the infrastructure that would be needed to make it worth the expense.

In the future, of course I think things will turn around, with the development of faster, better propulsion ssystems and more long-enduring and reliable life support systems. But as much as we may want that to happen in the near future, its much more likely that it will not happen for decades yet.

If people, especially those controlling the purse strings in Congress, understood just how vast the distances were out in space, I think they'd understand the need for more long-term planning and execution in the space program. We have to break out of the short-sighted cycle of trying to restart the space program every 4 or 8 years whenever we have a new president.

And I think the public in general would be more supportive of space efforts, knowing how daunting the task faced by NASA and other space agencies are. I think educating people on the true scale of things should begin in the science classroom, and science writers--and even science fiction creators--should be mindful of trying to convey that when it comes up.