Hopefully. It was delayed last evening because of clouds. I know one of the astronauts, so I especially don't want any accidents on this flight. She's an electrical engineer who's going to electrically reconfigure the space station. Also, it's important that NASA finishes the job of completing the space station.
We now only pay attention to space shots when something goes wrong. This is okay. A legacy rises to become culture only when its elements are so common that they no longer attract comment. Even though we've got no lunar bases and we haven't sent hibernating astronauts to Jupiter in outsized space ships, we have actually done quite well for ourselves. Low-earth orbit is still a frontier, of sorts. The empirical risk of death remains high. With two lost shuttles out of a hundred launches, an astronaut's chances of not coming home are about 2 percent. If those were your chances of death every time you drove your car, you might never drive your car. Astronauts are not unmindful of this risk, yet they take it anyway. They do it because the return outweighs the risk itself. They do it to push the boundaries of our existence. People like them would have been the first to leave the cave and see what was on the other side of the cliff face. The first to scale the mountains, sail the oceans. Touch the sky. And they will be the first to land on Mars.
We should search Mars for water, fossils, and life. Liquid water once ran on its surface. No longer. As earthlings who live on a fragile, wet planet, we ought to make this study a high priority. We should visit an asteroid or two and learn how to deflect them. We should drill through the kilometers of ice on Jupiter's moon Europa and explore its subsurface liquid ocean for living organisms. We should explore Pluto and its newly discovered family of orbiting icy bodies in the outer solar system because they contain clues to our planetary origins. We should probe Venus and its atmosphere. Its runaway greenhouse effect tells us that something went horribly wrong. Using people as well as robots, no part of the solar system should sit beyond our reach. But we cannot stall on the last broached frontier.
We now only pay attention to space shots when something goes wrong. This is okay. A legacy rises to become culture only when its elements are so common that they no longer attract comment. Even though we've got no lunar bases and we haven't sent hibernating astronauts to Jupiter in outsized space ships, we have actually done quite well for ourselves. Low-earth orbit is still a frontier, of sorts. The empirical risk of death remains high. With two lost shuttles out of a hundred launches, an astronaut's chances of not coming home are about 2 percent. If those were your chances of death every time you drove your car, you might never drive your car. Astronauts are not unmindful of this risk, yet they take it anyway. They do it because the return outweighs the risk itself. They do it to push the boundaries of our existence. People like them would have been the first to leave the cave and see what was on the other side of the cliff face. The first to scale the mountains, sail the oceans. Touch the sky. And they will be the first to land on Mars.
We should search Mars for water, fossils, and life. Liquid water once ran on its surface. No longer. As earthlings who live on a fragile, wet planet, we ought to make this study a high priority. We should visit an asteroid or two and learn how to deflect them. We should drill through the kilometers of ice on Jupiter's moon Europa and explore its subsurface liquid ocean for living organisms. We should explore Pluto and its newly discovered family of orbiting icy bodies in the outer solar system because they contain clues to our planetary origins. We should probe Venus and its atmosphere. Its runaway greenhouse effect tells us that something went horribly wrong. Using people as well as robots, no part of the solar system should sit beyond our reach. But we cannot stall on the last broached frontier.
