Subscribe to TimeLeftSimon Ramo’s Article “Too Big A Step For Mankind” 26 Apr LA Times
There is a wall between the academics and the explorers.
The former should no more decide what the explorers will undertake than the explorers should select the lab experiments of the academics.
Dr. Ramo’s article is an outstanding example of that necessary dichotomy.
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Re: “Too Big A Step For Mankind”, Dr. Simon Ramo’s Article in the 26 Apr LA Times.
While I greatly respect Dr. Ramo’s contributions to America’s technological growth, I submit that he is not well suited to decide whether we should send Americans to Mars, or engage in any other human space exploration.
It is a curious fact that the older we get, the more we tend to cling to what time we have left.
Columbus was born in 1451, so was 41 when he led his crews on their epic voyage to discover America.
Admiral Richard E. Byrd was 38 years old when he piloted the first airplane to fly over the North Pole.
And Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were both 39 years old when they landed on Earth’s Moon in 1969.
It is not widely known that Columbus led his sometimes mutinous crews beyond the point of no return ..they continued westward beyond a point where their available food and water supplies could allow them to beat their way back to Spain against the trade winds of the unknown Atlantic … forging onward to a hoped for landfall in what they thought would be China.
By contrast, our knowledge of Mars is truly comprehensive. We have landed our robots there and gathered detailed information about what we will encounter when our first humans land there. Details of the weather, the soil, the solar energy available, the climate and the terrain have been known for decades.
And Dr. Ramo makes a common error when appraising the difficulties we will encounter on a Mars trip … he casts it as operating with contemporary technology.
We humans are engaged in a literal technological and scientific knowledge explosion.
Just as tourists now visit our poles where once Admiral Byrd wintered over in what amounted to a hovel, we will not launch our next generation of Astronauts in the sytems we have now, but send our people to Mars in systems designed in the next decades using materials of unprecedented strength to weight ratios and electronics just now peering at us out of the labs at MIT, IBM and many others.
Buzz Aldrin has proposed using Mars’ moon, Phobos as a way station, a refuge and support base for human trips to the surface, and as the departure point for the return trips back home to Earth.
Just as the 20th Century saw unprecedented technical and scientific breakthroughs that made Moon landings possible, so this new century will see even more enabling technology that will allow Americans to lead the way to Mars, and eventually, perhaps in the 21st Century, terraforming Mars into the second human world circling our Sun.
The LA Times Story: Humans on Mars? Forget it