Think about what Voyager will see as it leaves our solar system after having traveled 11.7 billion miles. It's simply mind boggling!
From the article...
Dr. Gurnett and his team have spent the past few months analyzing their data, trying to nail down whether what they were seeing was solar plasma or the plasma of interstellar space. Now they are certain it was the latter, and have even pinpointed a date for the crossing: Aug. 25, 2012.
I have to admit that part of me is wondering if some alien ship will snap it up and transmit a message back to us.
1 comment:
It's clearly not true that the president believes that the space program should be privately funded: both the SpaceX Dragon and Orbital Sciences Cygnus spacecraft that have supplying the space station have done so under NASA contract.
This isn't really much of a break from the past: all the contractors on the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle programs were private companies. The government didn't actually do all the work: it managed those programs, but it hired companies like Lockheed, Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, etc., to do the engineering and the manufacturing.
What's different now is that the president is getting private companies to develop the entire launch vehicle themselves, so that at some point they can stop sucking on the government teat and offer launch services to other businesses without having the government involved at all.
This is historically what government has done with new technologies, from integrated circuits (originally developed for the space program), to the Internet (originally developed for DARPA in the Defense Department).
The president has also proposed a mission to capture an asteroid and send astronauts to it. This has practical safety applications for protecting earth from dangerous space rocks, as well as a very big cool factor.
Even if NASA winds down manned spaceflight, it will still be doing science missions, much like Voyager: NASA just launched a lunar atmosphere probe, and will launch another Mars mission in November.
So, the president isn't suggesting that we just curl up and die. He just isn't in a position to launch some giant new space initiative, when he has to fight tooth and nail just to get every American access to health care...
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