Of course we have been there for 48 years, instrumentally.
Mercury,Gemini,Apollo,Skylab, Shuttle & I.S.S. at the moment.

And yes, cosmic rays etc. do bother me too as well as radiation on Mars.

And I still rail against those at NASA who screwed up on Challenger & Columbia, (may God bless the Challenger & Columbia 7 and their families!)

Yes, there will always be accidents but there is a difference between pure
carelessness and a regular accident.

As I said, it is within our nature to explore and while there will always be a place for robotic spacecraft to pave the way and go where man cannot go to, Man will always want to go to.

And, there is that age old dream of one day, leaving this lovely little planet and heading out to the Stars.

Perhaps, it’s like the way we are all drawn to the Ocean, we are drawn to where we came from, The Oceans first but then The Stars because after all we are made up of ashes; the ashes of Stars.

Unlike private industry, NASA is not based on return for dollars spent. While every business is subject to belt tightening at times, there is a return on the dollar and profit margin by which to judge the need for “drastic cuts”. Were our government tightening the belt everywhere, your words would have more meaning. But our government is spending like there’s no tomorrow in areas where a select few are benefiting and strangling the budgets elsewhere.

My personal opinion is that we should protest budget cuts in every area we as individuals believe are important. We have a voice. But it takes many of our voices to be heard above the many decibels wielded by the powerful. This is but one of many of the petitions to Congress I have written. I’m glad you also decided to write one as well.

Puddintain didn’t say “don’t try” he said “send your letters to the House and Senate” where they can make a difference.

All of his information on civil servants lobbying and federal agencies supporting the President’s budget is correct. Letters complaining to NASA will have no impact.

Where have you been? You write as though we had not gone into space.

We are already there. We have just used stilts where our legs are weak.

I suppose some politicians and poets will tell you we aren’t there until we have human corporal presence as visualized in early 20th century science fiction. But scientists know that the amount of information returned by the unmanned probes far exceeds that obtained by manned flights, and this will likely be the case in the foreseeable future. In fact, the most interesting data we have derived from the desultory manned missions has been mainly about the human body and its limitations when exposed to the rigors of even a protected spaceflight environment.

You might look at the recent issue of Scientific American for a writeup on the cosmic ray problem facing interplanetary travelers, and some of the heroic (read “expensive”) measures proposed to solve it, still in conceptual stage. This is just one problem among many. You might also look at Bob Park’s book “VooDoo Science” [Oxford 2000], in which he makes a much stronger and more detailed case against manned space flight notions than I can make here. Dr. Park is head of the Washington DC branch of the American Physical Society, and a frequent debunker of romantic nonsense associated with space research. See: http://www.bobpark.org

Let us celebrate the manned space flight pioneers and heroes of the 20th century by not adding any more dead ones in the 21st.

Forcing the “man-in-space” issue now, as Bush and others want to do, will distract considerable energy, time, and money from projects with an enormous scientific and cultural payoff. They will also contribute to an ultimately damaging image of space progress tied to an outdated test pilot bravado atmosphere, when what we need is a generation or two of scientifically and technically proficient people committed to finish the unmanned projects we have undertaken and projected so far. There are storehouses of undigested data already, and more is on the way from projects already launched.

Where our instruments are, there is humankind.