Opinion: The right message for NASA

Soon after Mr. Bush’s [2004] announcement [of the “Vision for Space Exploration”] I predicted that sending astronauts to the moon and Mars would be so expensive that future administrations would abandon the plan. This prediction seems to have come true. All of the brilliant past discoveries in astronomy for which NASA can take credit have been made by unmanned satellite-borne observatories, and there is much more to be done.By studying the polarization of cosmic microwave radiation, we may find evidence of gravitational waves emitted in the first fraction of a second of the big bang. By sending laser beams between teams of satellites, we should be able to detect gravitational waves directly from collisions between neutron stars and black holes. By correlating the distances and velocities of many galaxies, we should be able to explore the mysterious dark energy that makes up most of the energy of the universe.

He adds that any “argument for using astronauts to service satellite observatories is now out of date” because the new research tools “are not in low Earth orbits like Hubble, but at L2."Weinberg closes with this: “The only technology for which the manned space flight program is well suited is the technology of keeping people alive in space. And the only demand for that technology is in the manned space flight program itself.”