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Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek recently, but I was disappointed earlier this week when I heard that Obama was killing the moon program.  Of course, along with that announcement came news that more money was going to be sent NASA’s way.  Their still going to work on really cool new technologies, including closed-loop life support among other things.  What’s the big deal with not going to the moon?  Certainly the moon is a considerably less interesting place to be than Earth.  There’s no particular reason that we need to go there.  Still, no one has walked on the moon in my lifetime.  And maybe the only reason we need to go is because it’s there.  I worry sometimes that the technical innovation of our goverment is largely focused on military applications.  On a recent edition of “The Geeks Guide to the Galaxy” podcast, P. W. Singer was interviewed about his book Wired for War, which discusses cool robots being built for war.  I want to believe that we can build cool technologies for things other than war… like say, exploration.

In any case, this announcement doesn’t really mean that no one is going to the moon in the near future.  It just means that no American is going to the moon in the near future.  The next person to set foot on the moon might well be Chinese.

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