Adventure or Inquiry? Two Visions of Cosmic Destiny

[pmbryant]

From the NY Times: Feb 3 2004

Adventure or Inquiry? Two Visions of Cosmic Destiny
By DENNIS OVERBYE

The best marriage of human spaceflight and science." That is how Dr. John M. Grunsfeld, astronomer, astronaut and chief scientist of NASA, described the Hubble Space Telescope when he announced last month that the agency was canceling maintenance missions to the telescope, which has dazzled the world with crisp visions of the cosmos.

Like every marriage, this one has had its ups and downs, and it seems to be ending like "The War of the Roses." NASA officials moved as swiftly as assassins after President Bush ordered them to redirect resources toward the Moon and Mars. Without service calls from shuttle astronauts, the telescope is likely to die in orbit around 2007, making science the first casualty of the new era. Not an auspicious beginning.

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The shuttle and the space telescope were a marriage of convenience, the visions driving them composing a sort of yin-yang heartbeat inside NASA.

In the 1970's, astronomers, who had long dreamed of a telescope above the blurry atmosphere, had no choice but to build a telescope that could be launched and maintained from the coming space shuttle.

Proponents of the shuttle then argued that their winged spaceship would be a great boon to science, a claim that came true in 1993 when spacewalking astronauts corrected a flaw in Hubble's optics. Subsequent service calls by the shuttle have continued to hone and improve the telescope's capabilities.


(snip)

At one extreme, the Bushian vision of space is the universe as a thing to be exploited, as property. But another branch on this tree leads to the concept of stewardship, to a role of gods, as Stewart Brand put it in the Whole Earth Catalog long long ago, in charge of Spaceship Earth. In many ways this is no less arrogant than the idea of subdividing Mars before we have ever been there.

(snip)

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/03/science/space/03ESSA.html