iPod Generation Indifferent to Space Exploration 526
An anonymous reader writes "CNN tells us that today's young adults are no longer excited at the possibility of space exploration: 'The 2004 and 2006 surveys by Dittmar Associates Inc. revealed high levels of indifference among 18- to 25-year-olds toward manned trips to the moon and Mars. The space shuttle program is slated to end in 2010 after construction of the international space station is completed with 13 more shuttle flights. The recent 13-day mission by Discovery's seven astronauts was part of that long-running construction job.' As a result, NASA's budget will include a greater amount of public relations spending."
Strange, I would have thought the reverse... (Score:3, Interesting)
Then again, I read Slashdot, so I may not represent my demographic.
NASA hasn't done anything exciting recently. (Score:5, Interesting)
Space exploration was exciting when it meant putting people on the moon; the public has lost interest when it just means sending people up to LEO over and over again, and the people in question aren't them.
I suspect that if we put a person on Mars, you would see an immediate renewed interest in space exploration. But seeing the state to which NASA and the government in general has fallen, I suspect most young people are (wisely) too cynical to believe that will ever occur. Thus they don't care, and turn their attentions to things that seem to be actually progressing.
Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
The "exploration" aspect of space is basically gone; we've been pretty much as far as we can feasibly go. It's not a frontier anymore, and it won't be until some future Columbus makes it to another star system and brings a few natives back.
They grew up with space... (Score:4, Interesting)
For most of their active life, as far as they were concerned, space flight is an everyday occurance.
They grew up with the Space Shuttle. They grew up with space stations. Exploration is practically common (face it, with the Mars rovers since the mid-90's...). So is it any surprise that manned exploration would get a yawn?
This happened in the 70's. I believe by Apollo 13, no one watched space launches on TV anymore (if the networks would even carry it) nor did the public actually care (until the tank exploded).
For those who grew up in the 70's, well, spaceflight was a mystical thing. These feelings probably stayed. It's basically assumed that spaceflight is a boring reality these days.
Go back a few years, say around the time I was born, and yes, you'd probably find more excitement about spaceflight (hell, I'd love to go).
Take aviation - nobody thinks much about hopping on a plane (other than the PITA that is security nowadays and long lineups) to go somewhere. Go back to the 1950s when travelling by commercial jet was fairly novel. Now, well, it's just another form of travel. The same thing is happening to spaceflight. The novelty has worn off on this "generation" - they grew up with it, and probably assume it's always been the case.
We are not the ipod generation! (Score:2, Interesting)
Opiate of the masses (Score:3, Interesting)
Fortunately, the US is not a democracy.
As a 15-year old... (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, I guess that the fact that I was homeschooled from grades 2 to 8 made a big difference aswell.
This is possibly insightful (Score:5, Interesting)
And I'm not surprised. The members of our generation (in their teens in the 60s, I guess) who were interested in space flight were not exactly your average passive consumer. My brother worked for NASA, and I did work on, among other things, rad-hard real time computers. When I was an undergraduate at a university not far from Ely, your audio system did not count unless you had built it yourself, from components, and by components I mean tubes, transistors, and for real kudos turn your own vinyl turntable out of an alumin(i)um blank.
Nowadays our modern equivalent, when it isn't doing the same kind of thing, is writing its own audio decoders.
The difference between then and now is quite simple. There is a lot more rubbish about. The size of the recording industry was not so bloated in the sixties and the bandwidth was much smaller. People built their own turntables, for the most part, to listen to Mozart and Wagner and (Richard) Strauss and perhaps Berio and Ligeti as I recall, not pop music which was beneath contempt; it was, after all, the product of multiple remixings from tape and there was no depth to bring out. Now, the record industry is trying to extend copyright still further on stuff with a shelf life of hours, and this is, for the most part, what will get loaded into iPods.
My conclusion? The Space Exploration generation and the iPod generation are probably practically disjoint sets. Sheep and goats, in fact. Nothing to see here; move along.
Re:NASA hasn't done anything exciting recently. (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps the rate of technological innovation and incremental improvements have much to blame for this attitude. When kids grow up assuming next year's model will be twice as fast and one-third the price, it raises the question, "Why do we need to go to Mars right now?". The extension of this is, "If the same equipment will so much cheaper next year, just like an iPod, why not save some money and visit Mars later. Mars isn't going anywhere."
Low Risk = Less Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, I believe the image of NASA has changed from that of a cutting edge government sponsored organization to a lumbering money pit. We really need to "fight" someone if we want public support... even if it's more PR than anything.
Man on mars? Not yet. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:NASA hasn't done anything exciting recently. (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally have hopes that the moon base will be sufficiently interesting to stoke the public demand for a Mars mission.
I'm 24 and when I was in grade school I had a teacher for 3 & 4th grades that was an absolute space nut. We had a chapter of Young Astronauts in the school, she had a space-shuttle cockpit (made from mostly wood with a bunch of dials and toggle switches inside) in her classroom that we could sit in and she filled the class with a sense of excitement about what was going on out there.
It's also worth mentioning that at this time NASA was a bit more exciting, too. Hubble just launched. Endeavor was brand new. And IIRC the Voyager had just left the solar system.
My point is that todays adults can get todays kids interested in this. And also that the prospect of people living on the moon is new and exciting enough that it just might work.
Re:Choices in music (Score:3, Interesting)
This simply isn't true. I was born in England in 1960, and did not come from a wealthy family: both my parents worked, we lived in a rented flat, and I remember them saving for well over a year to buy a small refrigerator, yet we had a record player and a fair number of records, and so did just about everyone else I knew (all of whom lived in council houses with two working parents and low incomes). Such devices were invariably mono with auto-changer turntables of dubious quality, and many were doubtless bought second-hand (as was ours), but they were pretty common, and their owners must have had at least some records, because the devices were useless without them.
NB: second-hand singles were available very cheaply because of the high turnover from juke-boxes, which tended to be supplied with new material on a regular basis, so the older stuff got turfed out to make space for it, and the companies that owned them tended to end up with large numbers of records they had no use for, and thus virtually gave away. You could tell they'd come from juke boxes because their middles had been punched out (although being four or five years old meant that I didn't know this at the time), but new "clip-on" middles could be bought very cheaply, so this wasn't a problem (most players in any case had adapters, but the replacement middles meant that records could be stacked on the auto-changer, which was good for parties). LPs (later called "albums") weren't used in juke-boxes though, so they were much more costly, and therefore a lot rarer among the low-income groups that I knew and mixed with.
I much prefer space over overratted iPods (Score:1, Interesting)
That said, our space industry in the United States is about on the par with the putrid moooosick industry. Our President has proposed a ship called the 'orion' or 'crew exploration vehicle' depending on what one reads. This ship if one wants to call it that is little more than a coffin into which we will place frail hopes. It is little more than the size, interior wise, of a volkswagen bus interior. It is fragile. It has no continuous propulsion capability. Its maneuverability is limited to short bursts of directional thrusters. A few short bursts. Into this literal beer can we propose to put six unfortunates so that they can sit in the dark in the cold of space for up to two years with inadequate supplies and an assumption that they will be able to 'mine the fuel for the return' when they get to Mars. As presently configured, they will have to do a 'high altitude low opening' individual parachute jump on a one way trip when they arrive. No worry though. They will be dead of: starvation from running out of supplies; radiation sickness from sitting in a beer can in a rad storm halfway there when our 'ole sol' gives out one of its famous corona discharges; killin each other from frustration or boredom or whatever...the Russian Cosmonaut Uri Krikalaev called this isolation and enforced closeness the perfect formula for murder; or they could just fart themselves to death and asphyxiate each other on their own flatulence. They will have to conduct all bodily functions during the whole trip. Where will be put the waste? How much of this will be water lost?
On the other hand, the Russian space program is much better thought out. They plan to go to Mars with a very large spacecraft. They plan to use solar electric propulsion utilizing a solar collector the size of a small town. They plan to shield the crew behind several feet of armored panel and fuel. They plan to use hydrogen propellant for reaction mass. They have on the drawing board a crew vehicle, the Kliper, that contains an emergency escape system AND provision for carrying a lot of supplies. The Kliper is part of a modular system including a propulsion module that mounts behind it and is scalable. Another module is the Parom interorbital tug for moving assemblies from low orbit to high orbit. The Parom is solar electric powered as well. Their modular system envisions a large crew quarters based on a scaled up Zvesda module(s) presently in use in the International Space Station. The complete Mars mission ship also envisions emergency escape module and a modularized Mars lander/ascender system. It is huge.
It is pilotable to many optional destinations. It is survivable. It will keep its crew alive
and healthy and entertained (important on long voyages). It has room for some privacy..again necessary for long voyages. It has room for real science!, something we ourselves have stated as our reason for going...that is before our knowledgable purresident proposed to put our men into a leaky beer can so their freeze dried bodies can be found some time in the future. No wonder our young people are not turned on by our space program. They know losers, in music, movies, and space travel when they see them. And NASA's plan is a real cropper. Wanna see a real plan.
Go to Roscosmos ENERGIA site and look at a real plan. If all we can come up with is to basically murder our astronauts, we owe it to our people the option of supportin the Russian plan
Re:NASA hasn't done anything exciting recently. (Score:2, Interesting)
Everyone seems to be seeing space exploration as pure scientific research. Yes, that is nice and useful and all... but we should be looking at it with the goal of eventually expanding human presence in the universe. I refer you to http://www.wellingtongrey.net/miscellaneous/archi
Re:Because the current manned space program is bor (Score:3, Interesting)
Certainly we have to build to higher tolerances these days. But we know what those tolerances are, and we are building nothing, doing nothing, but going in circles in low earth orbit running experiments drempt up by school children.
The space station serves no purpose. None. There is no new science being conducted there, and the platform has no utility for staging other missions or building space craft in orbit.
NASA, you want excitement? Establish a permanent international colony on the moon. You'll never get more positive press than when the first baby is born on the moon.