Shuttle Programs and Personal Space Flight
With no more missions to the Hubble Telescope planned and the shuttle program being retired I am left wondering how we will continue to receive these amazing images if we are no longer able to service the cameras. Now with the retirement of the shuttle programs leads me to wonder; are we really leaving outer space travel to civilians? I know that personal ‘trips’ to space are in the near future; or so says the designers and engineers at the “Spaceport America”. The Spaceport is located just outside Las Cruces, New Mexico, which incidentally is where my parents live and roughly 250 miles from my home.
I think that it would have been very humorous had Virgin Galactic had petitioned Roswell as the home of the Spaceport, but alas, they found a good cheap chunk of land in the middle of nowhere. According to reports (news, radio, etc) it seems that these personal journeys into the orbit surrounding earth cost roughly $100k and last merely a matter of hours. Now, if we are willing to shoot normal people into space for profit; why is it that we are no longer sending trained professionals into space to work on the equipment we use for taking and understand this beautiful and stunning universe we are surrounded by?
I wonder if this will hamper our ability to study life on other planets and other planetary research; and does this mean no missions to mars or other planets even within our own galaxy? Will we ever find that life form, in whatever form, that we have desperately been looking to find for the last few decades?
I think that alien life might be good for the world as we know it. I hope that perhaps extraterrestrial life is not worried about acne creams and fat burners. I want to believe that they have moved beyond vanity and superficiality. With our luck as human beings, they will probably be just like us, only smarter. Smart enough to build a ship strong and fast enough to make the journey to Earth. I hope that they are not as destructive as we seem to be. Blowing ourselves up, pouring oil into our oceans- sadly, this is life on Earth. Maybe the Aliens know better than to bother.
