40 years ago today, Neil Armstrong made world history by stepping on a moon. While the milestone was an amazing engineering feat, it is one that I personally feel was unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong, I think Astronauts are great and I’m proud America was the first to achieve the goal, but human space flight is something I do not think the government should pursue. The risk associated with space flight is high and realistically the functions the Astronauts perform could be done remotely with robotic technology that could actually help us in other ways here on Earth.
My first job after engineering school was working at Goddard Space Flight Center developing payload interfaces for the Shuttle and while the job was moderately interesting, it was my first real experience with the inefficiency of the Federal government. I look back at how poorly everything was run at NASA and can’t help but think that it would have been much better if the private sector had pursued it. First off, what is the purpose of human space flight? Are we expecting to colonize other planets? At $1,300,000,000.00 per Shuttle flight, we could alternatively put up more satellites for telecommunications, weather tracking, and other functions that assist us in our daily lives. Why not leave the moon walking to the Hollywood types?
