The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
by Lynn Lee
If you’re old enough to remember the Challenger explosion – my earliest memory of watching a national disaster on TV – you may, like me, see it as the de facto end of the Space Age. Not that NASA abandoned its mission or that space ever completely lost its grip on the public imagination. One need only look to the Mars Rovers and the recent advances made by SpaceX and Blue Origin for evidence to the contrary. But even the most exciting breakthroughs no longer command the universal attention that the Apollo missions or, yes, the Challenger debacle did back in their day. There’s also a growing sense that space travel has become the province of the ultrarich, and that as a species we should– taking a page out of Gil Scott-Heron – maybe think about fixing our problems here on Earth before laying claim to other worlds.
For those who hold onto the ideal of outer space as a gauntlet for human progress, there’s a tendency to look back wistfully at the golden age of space exploration, notwithstanding the more uncomfortable facts underlying the myth...
Return to Article