We're Number One - but for how long...?
This is my author blog, where I write about things related to my books. With that in mind, my aim is to avoid politics as much as I can. If you want to know who I support for president this year, I've made that pretty clear in other places around the net. I don't need to repeat it here.
Nevertheless, I wanted to point out this new opinion piece in the New York Times - "Houston, We Have a Problem". It's about the challenges facing our next president, whoever he may be, if the US is to keep its leadership role in space.
The columnist asserts that, "Not since John F. Kennedy, has a president truly understood the incalculable value of space." It's a credible claim. Richard Nixon killed the Apollo program. Ronald Reagan gave us the International Space Station, but with so little support that today's scaled-down version still isn't finished. George H.W. Bush tried to interest us in Mars, but failed to follow up his initial proposal. Bill Clinton's NASA director tried to do things faster, better and cheaper, but mostly what that got us was a bunch of debris scattered across the Martian landscape. And now we have George W. Bush, whose Moon/Mars initiative is ambitious, but so badly planned that we're going to be left without our own means of getting to the space station we built for at least four years.
The Moon of Lunar Pioneers is an international Moon. My main character, Blair Kelly, is an American, but her mom works for a Chinese company, the ferry that takes her to the Moon has an Indian captain, and her best friends on the Moon are Russian and Japanese. I think that if humanity is going to settle space, we've got to do it together. But that means the US has to do its part. If we don't, someone else will - and then they'll be going out there without us.
Nevertheless, I wanted to point out this new opinion piece in the New York Times - "Houston, We Have a Problem". It's about the challenges facing our next president, whoever he may be, if the US is to keep its leadership role in space.
The columnist asserts that, "Not since John F. Kennedy, has a president truly understood the incalculable value of space." It's a credible claim. Richard Nixon killed the Apollo program. Ronald Reagan gave us the International Space Station, but with so little support that today's scaled-down version still isn't finished. George H.W. Bush tried to interest us in Mars, but failed to follow up his initial proposal. Bill Clinton's NASA director tried to do things faster, better and cheaper, but mostly what that got us was a bunch of debris scattered across the Martian landscape. And now we have George W. Bush, whose Moon/Mars initiative is ambitious, but so badly planned that we're going to be left without our own means of getting to the space station we built for at least four years.
The Moon of Lunar Pioneers is an international Moon. My main character, Blair Kelly, is an American, but her mom works for a Chinese company, the ferry that takes her to the Moon has an Indian captain, and her best friends on the Moon are Russian and Japanese. I think that if humanity is going to settle space, we've got to do it together. But that means the US has to do its part. If we don't, someone else will - and then they'll be going out there without us.
Comments
Help, please. All recommend this program to effectively advertise on the Internet, this is the best program!