Great points and great blog too. Paradoxically I think what's missing is more manned space exploration - people have a genuine interest in seeing other planets and knowing about space in general, but this interest is tempered by the painful awareness that that we will never get to visit them, so that it's like being on an island with a tall tower and a great telescope (through which we can see enticing other places) but no way of building a boat.
Of course going into space is so expensive and so few of us would make the cut as astronauts that hardly anyone realistically expects to become a space explorer, but we would like to live vicariously through other space explorers, but this isn't possible if our explorers never go anywhere. I think the reason people get so wrapped up in the story of the Mars rovers and the Rosetta/Philae mission was that those probes are the most relateable things since people walked on the Moon in the 1970s.
Really, I think we should be doing manned Moon missions regularly. People point out that there's nothing on the Moon that we want, which is sort of true (although we've learned so much since the last time we went that we should reconsider that angle) but that's a dreadfully consumerist mindset. The Moon is a (relatively) accessible destination that we could use as a proving ground for interplanetary exploration techniques. But more importantly, making regular visits or having a permanent outpost there gives people something to project their imaginations onto (including their political and technological imagination). I have a small collection of old newspapers and my favorite is one published the day after the first Moon landing with the simple headline 'Men on Moon'. Reading it still gives me a shiver of excitement, followed by disappointment that we abandoned Moon exploration by the mid 1970s.
One often-forgotten detail of the Moon landing was that at the time there was a Russian observer spacecraft orbiting the Moon, and it dropped down to within 10 miles of the surface at the time of the landing (presumably to observe what the Americans were up to). I saw Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Charlie Rose last week and he was joking that his favorite daydream is meeting the Chinese President at a conference and persuading him to leak a fake memo saying China aims to land a man on Mars, which would galvanize the American body politic back into serious investment in space. Sad but true.
Of course going into space is so expensive and so few of us would make the cut as astronauts that hardly anyone realistically expects to become a space explorer, but we would like to live vicariously through other space explorers, but this isn't possible if our explorers never go anywhere. I think the reason people get so wrapped up in the story of the Mars rovers and the Rosetta/Philae mission was that those probes are the most relateable things since people walked on the Moon in the 1970s.
Really, I think we should be doing manned Moon missions regularly. People point out that there's nothing on the Moon that we want, which is sort of true (although we've learned so much since the last time we went that we should reconsider that angle) but that's a dreadfully consumerist mindset. The Moon is a (relatively) accessible destination that we could use as a proving ground for interplanetary exploration techniques. But more importantly, making regular visits or having a permanent outpost there gives people something to project their imaginations onto (including their political and technological imagination). I have a small collection of old newspapers and my favorite is one published the day after the first Moon landing with the simple headline 'Men on Moon'. Reading it still gives me a shiver of excitement, followed by disappointment that we abandoned Moon exploration by the mid 1970s.
One often-forgotten detail of the Moon landing was that at the time there was a Russian observer spacecraft orbiting the Moon, and it dropped down to within 10 miles of the surface at the time of the landing (presumably to observe what the Americans were up to). I saw Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Charlie Rose last week and he was joking that his favorite daydream is meeting the Chinese President at a conference and persuading him to leak a fake memo saying China aims to land a man on Mars, which would galvanize the American body politic back into serious investment in space. Sad but true.