"Audacious Dreams"

[rhoenix]

This is a video (done to ME music, incidentally), of part of a speech made by Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, in regards to NASA. I found it singularly thought-provoking and inspiring.

[youtube][/youtube]

[Josh]

Basically, space needs marketing. It marketed itself once upon a time with the Moon race and so on, but now they managed to make space mundane in the public eye, and get treated as a luxury expense instead of a vital portion of humanity's growth.

Space also reaaaaaally needs a big public advocate who goes on the stump for it. Yeah, there's Cameron and so on, but there's nobody showing up on TV every week.

Still and all, we're still on the go for the asteroid mining.

[Stofsk]

I feel that you can't have a better advocate for science and space exploration than a man like Neil DeGrasse Tyson. The real problem is that your country (and mine too, but not in the same way nor to the same extent) doesn't value science or education all that highly. That's not the kind of problem you can fix with a flash marketing campaign. At best it would be a band-aid solution to deal with something cancerous.

[Josh]

I feel that you can't have a better advocate for science and space exploration than a man like Neil DeGrasse Tyson. The real problem is that your country (and mine too, but not in the same way nor to the same extent) doesn't value science or education all that highly. That's not the kind of problem you can fix with a flash marketing campaign. At best it would be a band-aid solution to deal with something cancerous.

Science was sexy, once upon a time. I think the problem is that too many people ran into the drudgery portion, or maybe had shitty teachers that really didn't communicate the cool. I know that of all the science teachers I had in school, only two stuck out as being particularly passionate about their field and could communicate it at all effectively. College, both the last time I was there and in my present pass, has presented similar percentages. (Rule of thumb my grad buddies gave me going in: avoid any class taught by a doctor.)

So most of my local generation got the idea that science was stupid and boring and involved tedious maths and shit.

Still, some marketing would be nice. The History Channel can make Hitler walking his dog across the street interesting, with CGI graphical representations with zooming arrows and rapid rotating views. The NASA channel? They hardly ever actually sync up what they're showing with the satellite guide so you know what's on, and when I have made the time to watch some TV it's usually something dirt dull or grainy old footage of the Titans heaving payloads upward. Now, I love the sight of massive, powerful rockets thrusting upwards with their mighty staff-like shapes as much as the next... ahem... totally heterosexual dude, but when you've seen one you've pretty much seen 'em all.

[Stofsk]

I am unsure if science was ever sexy once upon a time. One of my favourite quotes is from Isaac Asimov and he said: 'There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge".'

Also, your education system is mightily borked. Like, 'guys we should really tear down the Department of Education and start again' sort of borked.

And some marketing might be nice, but I think a bigger issue that would serve NASA better would be to form a long-term goal over the next several decades and work towards it. The problem with THAT is funding for NASA seems to always be fucking affected by changes in Presidential administrations. This is where you get bullshit like Bush ordering a new heavy lift rocket like Constellation and Obama coming in and killing that program, and then saying 'but we want NASA to have a heavy lift rocket this decade'. Also, I became recently aware that NASA doesn't actually get paid any of the royalties that their technological advances have brought- the US Treasury does.

I'd love to see NASA get more funding and I agree with Tyson that funding NASA gives a greater return on your dollar than almost any other federally-funded program. It does seem though that NASA is run by people who can't manage projects effectively within budgets. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it's probably a good thing for engineers and scientists to reevaluate what they want their next space doohicky to do. But it doesn't look good to penny-pinching legislators who control the purse-strings. But I'd rather see a new space telescope and a moon colony than a new type of nuclear bomb or another aircraft carrier or whatever.

[Josh]

When I get the chance I'll dig up Phil Plait's article about why NASA is so fucked up on budgets. If I recall correctly, and I'm going by memory on this one, he said that they tend to turn in project budgets pared down enough to get approved, in the hopes of getting deep enough in to the project that when it goes overbudget, they'll just get continuing support and infusions.

Totally agreed about our educational system. I've been grappling with how it could be fixed/replaced for years and never really came up with a good answer that could work in the present architecture.

And I had no fucking idea that Treasury was getting the royalties. That's all kinds of fucked. Space exploration is not on the best bang-for-buck with spin-offs, but in terms of economic stimulus it's got some of the best translation from money spent to employment created, at least if you go by the example of Apollo.