NASA's mission is not safety

[Valin]

USA Today:

To honor the lives lost in past missions, we must keep exploring.

Rand Simberg

January 31, 2013

 

It has been a century since the Panama Canal was completed. It was the greatest transportation project of its time, made possible only by new technologies such as dynamite. After Americans took over its construction, more than 5,000 died building the canal. That's more fatalities than we had in the Iraq War.

 

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At times, we seem to have forgotten. In the 21st century, do we still see exploring and opening up new territory as worth the expenditure of, or even the risk to, human life?

 

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The obsession with safety is sincere, if unspoken, testimony to just how unimportant we consider the opening of that final and harshest of frontiers. The last time space was important was when we were racing the Soviets to the moon more than four decades ago. Now, we no longer consider it worth the risk. Had we taken such an attitude in Panama, no one would have turned the first shovel of dirt.

 

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