New York Times issues “Invitation to a Dialogue: Our Ambitions in Space”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0109
The 22 July New York Times editorial “After the Space Shuttle ” declared that with the final landing of Atlantis last week, the “question now is whether the nation can summon the will to push hard for a far more ambitious set of manned voyages.” The editors expressed their continued belief “that this country can do exciting things in space that can inspire a new generation.” Now they’re asking for brief comments from the public. Is this an opportunity for some science outreach?
A letter in the 27 July Times carries the headline “Invitation to a Dialogue: Our Ambitions in Space .” The author, an engineer with decades of experience in aerospace, cites the editorial’s mentions of ambition and inspiration, then continues:
I believe that Apollo and the shuttle’s Hubble telescope repair flights proved conclusively the value of human space flight. Apollo sent half a dozen manned expeditions to land on the moon in less than a dozen years from the program’s conception. That’s “ambitious,” and it certainly inspired my generation.
Unfortunately, I cannot characterize the Obama plan as either ambitious or inspiring. President Obama wants us to spend the next 25 years on scientifically useless stunts like sending manned expeditions to land on a small asteroid and to orbit Mars.
The goal is to land on Mars and search for life. We should immediately start on the Mars Direct proposal of Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society. We could return to the moon before this decade is out, followed by the first human landing on Mars early in the next decade. We could have permanent bases on the moon and perhaps Mars by the end of the next decade.
Dick Morris, Seattle
Then follows this “editor’s note": “We invite readers to respond to this letter for our Sunday Dialogue. We plan to publish responses and Mr. Morris’s rejoinder in the Sunday Review. E-mail: letters@nytimes.com.”
I was already working on a media report about end-of-the-shuttle-era punditry. I’ll file it after the NYT‘s Sunday edition appears. They’ll print a handful of the pithiest letters. Maybe some will come from the physics community.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are published in ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
