The world on a 62,000-mile-long string
Pointing out that “no human being . . . has ventured further upward into space than 386 miles” in the last 30 years, President Bush proposed new goals for NASA as 2004 began. The agency, he said, should build a new spacecraft called Crew Exploration Vehicle by 2008, retire the space shuttle by 2010, return to the moon by 2015, and send spacecraft from there to “Mars and to worlds beyond.”
We applaud the idea of putting humans on Mars. Exploring and colonizing the solar system and eventually the farthest reaches of the galaxy may be humankind’s salvation.
But the half-century-old practice of blasting people and machinery into space via barely controlled chemical explosions is a dangerous and expensive way to achieve such noble objectives. The president, Congress, NASA, and the American people need to actively consider the possibility of reaching space without rockets ...
