James Nicoll, one of my go-to sources for odd information about space related issues, is attempting to determine whether it’s true that space enthusiasm is for older people. Unsurprisingly, given who he is and what he writes about, his comments have turned up lots of examples of people born after 1980 who are wild for space travel. I think the term is “selection bias.”
My readership is probably somewhat less space-crazed than his, but I doubt you all would be a representative sample, either. If you’ve got opinions on the subject, though, go leave him a comment. Or leave one here.
(Update: Janet offers another couple of counter-examples.)
Personally, I tend to agree with the pseudonymous commenter who said:
People who were born back in the day grew up in an era when space travel seemed like it was a) achievable, and b) not utterly pointless. Now, of course, it seems a bit silly and retro, like tailfins on cars and anti-Communist scares. So people who are born in the ’80s will never have lived in an era when space travel was cool, and won’t have that holdover attitude stuck with them.
I might not be quite that snarky about it, but I think that’s the basic mechanism. I’m old enough to remember when the Space Shuttle seemed like a good idea, and stayed home from school to watch the first launch, but manned space flight looks much less cool these days.
As someone else points out, though, there’s probably a useful distinction to be made between opinions of manned space flight and opinions of unmanned missions and space telescopes and that sort of thing.
I was born in 1980, and was crazy for space as a kid. We watched the Challenger disaster – live on the news – in our first grade classroom, and even after that, I wanted to go.
I get teary when people go into space in movies. I know many people in my age group who feel the same, and who follow with great interest the robotic missions.
It’s not patriotism, but maybe it’s a sort of human chauvinism.
Why send meat when its consummables’ mass could be more robot(s)? Why send meat that must be returned – consummables, propellant, vehicle? Why send meat?
What does International Space Station Freedom FUBAR Space Hole One Alpha do? OK, it burns out steering gyros because NASA flacks want it to fly tangential to the surface instead of its long axis spontaneously pointed at the Earth’s center. That is not a space program, that’s income redistribution toward favored contractors.
Each Space Scuttle launch is $2 billion for starters. The Space Scuttle has a 22 tonne payload in a 69 tonne vehicle. What kind of idiot would send the Space Scuttle along for the ride – as opposed to a cargo shroud and 4X the boosted payload mass? If ass-tronaughts need flight time, make them Homeland Severity Sky Marshalls.
My youngest son was born in 1993, and he is interested in space and NASA. (He had a NASA-member teacher in 4th grade that really helped stimulate this). Early days, but he just might be one of the men that Uncle Al is pissed about, and that Elton John sang about. I don’t like to think about David Bowie’s Major Tom.
I was born in the 1980s. I’m in favor of public funding for space research, against public funding of space travel.
I was born in 1967… so I guess I’m pretty hopeless. (Not to mention that my dad is an aeronautical engineer.) One of my earliest memories is of being woken up at 2AM or something to watch the launch of one of the moon shots. Add to that an early diet of world-traveling SF and I’m a goner.
That doesn’t prevent me from seeing the problems with today’s manned program. We definitely don’t need to do more of that. I guess for me, the priority is finding more efficient tools to reach high orbit. That has value for both manned and unmanned missions, making it much less of an either-or question.
As someone who is more than a little bit of a rocket nut, and still comparatively young, it’s no mystery at why space is not “popular”.
The most important cause is that computers are phenomenally powerful, such that bending them to your will is much more productive than bending aluminum and titanium and graphite composites to your will. This means that you can accomplish things as part of a much smaller group and with a much smaller budget much quicker and get compensated much more (monetarily or otherwise) using computers than you can using rockets.
The second most important cause (albeit somewhat related) is that the country’s biggest space program is a military one, and the second biggest is an only slightly disguised jobs program, both of which are somewhat intrinsically demotivating as well as lead to what can be considered unpleasant work environments.
It’s just not the coolest thing out there any more, and for something that once was, that’s always going to be a letdown.
I am older and have been a space enthusiast since the Gemini program – the earliest I can remember. I don’t support “space” or “space travel” though – what the heck does that mean? I would (and do) support things like scientific exploration of other worlds, or research and development of energy in space, or learning to build self-contained ecosystems that humans could live in, downwind and downstream of themselves. I only see the “space program” as doing a little of the first.
There are reasons to expand human presence and human economy off the face of the earth, but they should be argued directly not in relation to “space”. Some good, some bad.
For example – using space based systems to shoot down ballistic missiles. I don’t think we are close to being able to do this is a reasonable way, but for example, you would need easier access to space to do it, and so we got projects like DCX, which were leading some where, not worried about existing contractors etc.
Another example already done – space based communication – I suspect this will become even more important as Asian areas recover after the earthquake and think about resiliency.
Anyway those are productive discussions.
Well, if we cut back on manned space missions, can we at least get Mel Brooks a pony as a consolation prize for crushing his dream?
I was born in 1981 and I am all for space travel. If you want to indoctrinate your kid with space travel, give him Lem’s novels 😉
The answer is in your title. We need to put Kids in Space. 12 years is a good age to start. Imagine the interest if Virgin Galactic puts a 12-year old into Space. The next step will be for kids to be born in Space.
I LOVE the suggestion about leveraging celebrities and the media to sell the space dream. Having worked at NASA back in the eighties and actually having built and handled a few instruments that reached orbit and even other planets, I am definitely sold on the dream and, at the same time, frustrated with the current realities of a largely underfunded bureaucracy that is today’s NASA. Despite all the frustrations, it has been a banner year for the agency results-wise with Hubble continuing to perform, the unstoppable Mars rovers, and the Nobel prize nod.
Yet with all of that, most of my friends and colleagues are simply unaware of what is really happening. It is no wonder nobody is interested or supportive of expanded budgets. They never even hear the science news amidst the clamor of popular celebrity-driven culture. (this, in fact was one of the key motivators for me to start my own science blog.)
This post reminded me of a rather sad moment which supports the need for celebrity spokespeople. Back in the mid nighties, when I was the CTO at MicroDisplay, my girlfriend of that era, also a fine product of MIT, was recruited to present awards at the Discovery Magazine technology awards ceremony at Disney World, and I got to tag along and chat with some other folks from the MIT mafia that happened to be around the show. Several other luminaries and celebrities were recruited to present, including Bruce McCandless, the first Astronaut to pilot the MMU without any tether. Here is the link to the canonical image from his first untethered space walk.
The grand irony for me was that after the show, I happened to be sitting next to McCandless as we watched LeVar Burton, then playing Giordi Laforge on Star Trek: TNG get absolutely swarmed with fans, while nobody even gave McCandless a second glance. I turned to McCandless and asked him if he thought it was odd that people seemed more interested in the person that pretended to be in space, rather than the first person to actually fly a jet pack in space. He chuckled rather ruefully,and we just shook our heads together. The power of celebrity indeed. At least I had a great chat with the real space jockey all to myself.
I was born well before 1980, and as far as I’m concerned, space is over. Yeah, it was kind of interesting while it was going, but nowhere near as interesting as aviation ever was. At least with aviation you aren’t dealing with distances that quickly become difficult to imagine, let alone traverse.
I’ve been doing research on private space travel for an employer of mine, and I despise it. When the first corporate astronaut dies due to old technology, I’m going to say, “I told you so.” Screw the Canadian Arrow, rebuilding the Avro Arrow would be less of a waste of time. The only genuinely practical application I can see for sending rich people into space is shooting Bill Gates (et cetera) into the sun.
I don’t mean to sound like a troll; I just genuinely have strong negative feelings on the subject. I’m one of James Nicoll’s regular readers, by the way.
I don’t know about the 1980 cutoff, but there does seem to be a lack of enthusiasm for space travel among my generation. (I’m 23.) Of course, there are notable exceptions, like the folks who do Yuri’s Night. However, the pattern is clear and it’s not confined to space travel. It seems like my generation has trouble with big ideas of any sort. For example, many are socially engaged but few have a clear vision of the society they want to create or a taste for long-term projects. Among the class of incoming Ecology Ph.D. students here at the University of Georgia (a very bright group in one of the country’s top programs), only a few seem interested in pursing fundamental principles. I don’t know if this is more of a generational pattern or an age-related one, though.
When someone says that young people are apathetic about space exploration, I have to ask: Compared with what? Is there a scientific endeavor that young people are nuts about? Or are they apathetic about science in general?
Compared with what? Compared with how they used to be, for starters – I can remember (barely) a time when people were still excited about humans entering space.
With the passage of time, most of my age-compatriots realized that the space program was just a way of achieving a public relations coup and seizing the “high ground” before the Soviets did – going to the Moon was a demonstration of our technological superiority and booster capability, nothing more.
The simple truth is that we never did anything of real scientific value with the manned space program, and its potential was completely wasted – and it was always going to be that way from the start.
Teleoperative robots are a more appropriate choice for local space, and autonomous probes are better for the other planets and asteroids. If we’re not going to be serious about sending people, it’s best not to send people at all – and never for exploration. Never.