Friday, October 24, 2008

the final frontier

Its Space. Its naturally cool. Its dreamy, dark, and mysterious. And yet we avoid it like a plague.

Oh its too difficult to go there. Its too expensive. Whatever.

Miles O Brien wrote a peice on facebook that Kristi pointed me too. Maybe after some spell checking and adding some grammar, it should be posted on CNN.com.

His piece says one thing:
if you dare to dream, then you must be willing to meet that challenge ... but beware ... the dream is much harder than you imagined and you will need to be better than you give yourself credit for.

And that is what makes it so worthwhile. When you set the bar higher than you think you can go, you end up achieving more. And dreams are about meeting all the little challenges and when they are put together its the collection of challenges that equal the dream.

back to space.

NASA is a great representation of science. Underfunded and still overachieves. Mars rovers that last like ten times longer than planned. Mars Phoenix which observed ice, and ice clouds, and dug in the dirt. The jupiter flyby, the saturn flyby, the Mercury flyby, the comet crasher, hubble telescope. sure hubble failed but only because NASA was retasked for a mission with a lower bar. We dont need to use the moon to get to MARS.