space exploration like cathedral building
ie, by the rich, for the rich, to make certain people more rich, and offhandedly lend a bit of "progress" to the general population, which they will have to pay for by letting the rich walk all over them, but justified as a natural and important pursuit of the human mind. oh, wait, the article doesn't say any of that.
eminently quotable speech on the "Real reasons" of space exploration. via kb, who calls bullshit but agrees anyway. quotes (incl. quotes of quotes):
When you do things for Real Reasons instead of Acceptable Reasons, you have a chance to obtain Real Success. And so we have a conundrum. The cultural ethos in America today requires us to have Acceptable Reasons for what we do. We must have reasons that pass analytical muster, that offer a favorable cost/benefit ratio that can be logically defended. We tend to dismiss out of hand reasons that are emotional, or are value-driven in ways that we can't capture on a spreadsheet. But, Acceptable Reasons alone don't take us where we really want to go.
In my view, the space business more than most other endeavors suffers from the fact that the most important, the best, and the most basic reasons for doing it are Real Reasons and not Acceptable Reasons.
"A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing," by the character Lord Darlington in Oscar Wilde's play "Lady Windermere's Fan."
the JFK quote about space that I love more than anything in the world, because it evokes exactly the things I'm talking about here tonight, was the one he gave from this lectern at Rice University in September of 1962, when he said "We choose to go to the moon, and to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
