Space Quote: Losing Our View of the Starry Night

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The Milky Way galaxy. (NASA/A.Fujii)

“In 2016, astronomers reported that the Milky Way was no longer visible to a third of humanity and light pollution has worsened considerably since then. At its current rate most of the major constellations will be indecipherable in 20 years, it is estimated. The loss, culturally and scientifically, will be intense.”

-Statement in an article in The Guardian, titled “Stars Could be Invisible Within 20 years as Light Pollution Brightens Night Skies.” One scientist quoted in the article added, “A couple of generations ago, people would have been confronted regularly with this glittering vision of the cosmos – but what was formerly universal is now extremely rare. Only the world’s richest people, and some of the poorest, experience that any more. For everybody else, it’s more or less gone.”

Space Quote: New Horizons Can Do Much More

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Pluto in colorized infrared. (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/ZLDoyle)

“New Horizons can still do great science for the rest of its time in the Kuiper belt. But stopping it next year is both premature scientifically and unwise from the standpoint of fiscal policy. I am very concerned about this, and it is fair to say that I am in good company.”

-Statement by Alan Stern, New Horizons’s principal investigator, as printed in The Guardian regarding NASA’s decision to reduce funding for the New Horizons spacecraft next year even though another four to five years exploration of the Kuiper Belt had been planned. While the spacecraft will still perform some basic functions related to monitoring “space weather,” it will not have a new destination for the time being.

Space Quote: Russia Has Been a Good Space Partner, China Not so Much

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The Russian Segment of the International Space Station (ISS) (http://www.russianspaceweb.com/)

“We built the International Space Station with the Russians. What a contrast, with the Chinese government,…They are secretive, they are non-transparent. They will not share when Earth is threatened by one of their tumbling rockets coming back in, they will not share their trajectories, so it’s a huge difference in the way we approach our civilian space program with the Russians visa vie the Chinese.”

-Statement by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson during a recent interview with the Canadian CTV ‘s  Power Play. Of course, NASA has been prohibited from coordinating with China on space issues since 2011, so it should be no surprise that the Chinese have gone their own way.

Space Quote: Another Word for Explosion

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The Starship before the “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” (SpaceX)

“As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation.”

-Statement by SpaceX following the self-destruct of the Starship rocket after it started to spin out of control. What a way to put a spin on a malfunction. I am sensing the rapid unscheduled disassembly of the English language.

Space Quote: The Value of the ISS

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Components of the International Space Station (ISS). (NASA)

“An attempt to do a cost-benefit analysis on ISS science would be rather difficult. Science research rarely conforms to that kind of examination while it’s being done. Only after the fact, when an entrepreneur rolls out some new product or service, can one point to something done in a laboratory as having helped to make it happen. The best bet for ISS science is the technology for 3D printing human organs for transplant patients. The number of lives that would be saved might make the $100 billion spent on the ISS worth it.”

-Statement in a recent editorial from The Hill titled, “Has the science on NASA’s International Space Station been worth the money?” In addition to 3D printing of human organs, you might want to view the other ISS achievements (also mentioned in the editorial) and decide for yourself: