A bit off topic, but this seems like a worthy little project to raise public awareness of the impact of light pollution.
I remember growing up in Dallas in the early 1970s (yes, I'm dating myself) and having no trouble seeing the rings of Saturn on a medium-sized telescope. When I visit there now, no way you could have the same clarity of seeing. And the problem is getting worse. According to the International Dark Sky Association, outdoor lighting is increasing by 4% a year in the U.S. - faster than the rate of population growth. This unfortunate side effect of urbanization is wholly unnecessary (there are better ways to install outdoor lighting that minimize upward leakage) and wasteful (8% of U.S. energy use is for outdoor lighting, most of which doesn't go where it's intended).
Arthur C. Clarke apparently believed America's smartest people were wasting their time on banking, law, and insurance instead of the space program:
...I came across a searing indictment by Clarke on the American capitalist system. After observing that the structure of American society may be unfitted for the effort that the conquest of space demands he continued, "No nation can afford to divert its ablest men into essentially non-creative and occasionally parasitic occupations such as law, insurance and banking". He also referred to a photograph in Life Magazine showing 7,000 engineers massed behind a new model car they had produced as ‘a horrifying social document’. He was appalled by the squandering of technical manpower it represented.
http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2011/03/arthur-c-clarke-science-fiction-and.html
Especially in light of the post-mortems of the 2008 global financial meltdown, when it became apparent that the best and the brightest mathmaticians out of Harvard et al. were being hired by Wall Street to engineer extremely complicated algorithms for derivatives trading, it's kind of hard to argue with his point. In the early 1980s there was a strategic shift in America away from manufacturing and towards the so-called FIRE (financial, insurance, and real estate) sector. More complicated than we need to go in here, but this obviously had profound consequences (both good and bad). There is certainly a very compelling case to be made that this strategic shift needs to be corrected for the general health of the American economy, and not just because it would benefit U.S. human spaceflight.
There was a very interesting article in Harper's Magazine a couple of years ago on this (FIRE) subject, but the gist is that we have misallocated our human capital towards relatively non-productive (but get-rich-quick) sectors like finance, in order to achieve what was putatively thought to be a more efficient allocation of resources in a global economy. In other words, this was the first stage of Globalization: we do the white collar stuff and let the Less Developed Countries manufacture stuff. If we want to change strategic direction, we should do it for other reasons and not just because we want to build cool spaceships that go to Jupiter.
Hat tip: Amazing News http://newtstuff.blogspot.com/2011/03/arthur-c-clarke-believed-americas.html
Despite the general ideological proclivity under Soviet communism to undermine individual initiative, compared with the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo programs, the Soviet approach to safe and effective systems engineering for their early spacecraft involved the creation of (let's just say) very high incentives for individual engineers:
"[The Voskhod-1] was so cramped that the cosmonauts could not wear spacesuits. The story goes that one of the engineers warned the chief designer, Sergei Korolev, that the slightest leak of air would kill those on board. Korolev's solution was to appoint the engineer as one of the cosmonauts, figuring that this would help motivate him to make the capsule as safe as possible. All three cosmonauts survived the mission - although others were not so lucky."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/9420752.stm
Penny wise and pound foolish. I'm tempted to make a political comment about the current budget negotiations, but I will refrain. For now.
"We do not have enough money in the planetary program, by any stretch of the imagination, to fund a full-up Europa mission, a full-up Mars program, a full-up New Frontiers program, a full-up Discovery program and a full lunar program," Ed Weiler, the chief of NASA's science directorate told reporters.
Nevertheless, NASA officials say they will restructure the planetary program to match a projected budget reduction, even if the cuts aren't as deep as the White House proposed in its notional numbers. "We can't afford to keep everything," said Jim Green, director of NASA's planetary science division."
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1103/17flagship/
NASA study concludes - as we kind of knew - that current food systems are inadequate for long-duration spaceflights without compromising crew members' health and performance. There was a good episode of Nova Science Now on this subject a month or two ago. Seems that blueberries are a magic food in helping to prevent DNA/cell damage from cosmic radiation.
But still:
"If we go to Mars, we need a five year shelf life of food and that means we need to start looking at new technologies to start preserving the food," said Michele Perchonok, Advanced Food Technology Manager at NASA and one of the study authors.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110305133527.htm
For long-duration missions like Mars, I don't see how there's any way around the need to grow some of the food in the spacecraft. And for that, we're going to need a much bigger capsule than Orion.
Calling Bigelow...
