Dichroic Reflections

In Memoriam ... and in future

It's a sad week, if you love the idea of space exploration. NASA had its own memorials but I wish we had a national day of memory, with parades and speeches and solemn bells tolling to remember the deaths whose anniversaries fall this week.

January 27, 1967. Apollo 1. Grissom, White. Chaffee. [bong]

January 28, 1986. Challenger. Scobee, Smith, Resnik, Onizuka, McNair, Jarvis, McAuliffe. [bong]

February 1, 2002. Columbia. Husband, McCool, Anderson, Brown, Chawla, Clark, Ramon. [bong]

[bong. bong. bong. bong. bong. bong. bong. bong.
bong.]

Appropriately, NASA has honored all three crews with the names of sites on Mars. The area where Spirit landed is now designated Columbia Memorial Station, and there are hills around it now called Chaffee, White, and Grissom. The area where Opportunity landed is now Challenger Memorial Station.

Rudder's proposal is that there be a day set aside, like Veteran's Day, to honor explorers, all those who died finding new lands and maybe even those who didn't. That could apply to everyone from Magellan's crew, most of whom didn't make it all the way around the world, to Scott's crew in Antarctica to Commander Rick Husband's crew on Columbia.

Like a lot of people, I'm not sure space exploration ought to be handled by governments instead of private industry. Or maybe the exploration of this planet provides the appropriate model: Columbus was financed by Ferdinand and Isabella, and Scott was financed partly by the British government. Maybe with the X prize and the several competitors for it, this is the time for the private businesses to take over. There's a fortune waiting out there -- quite a few fortunes: mining, tourism, microgravity manufacturing just to name three. (If history holds, though, the real money will be made Levi Strauss style -- not in the first rush but in the supply chain.)The problem is that to harvest all that it takes quite a bit more than a leaky wooden ship and a pressed crew, and it takes the sort of long-term view that businesses are typically not good with. But there's lots and lots of money to be made, and that's a powerful inducement.