Common Themes

“Why I gave up on NASA”, originally posted at Hoshichan.com on July 30, 2008; reprinted in full on December 1, 2008 since the blog is no more.

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Brian sent me this yesterday. I started this post as a reply back to him but realized it made for a good rant. And good post fodder.

Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. told SCI FI Wire that fantastic space science fiction shows and movies are, in part, responsible for the lack of interest in real-life space exploration among young people.

“I blame the fantastic and unbelievable shows about space flight and rocket ships that are on today,” Aldrin said in an interview during an ice cream party held by the National Geographic Channel at the Television Critics Association press tour in Beverly Hills, Calif., this week. “All the shows where they beam people around and things like that have made young people think that that is what the space program should be doing. It’s not realistic.”

For the most part, I disagree with Mr. Aldrin. I do not think lack of realism is making kids less interested in the space program. I think lack of anything interesting happening, AT ALL, is making kids less interested in the space program. And it’s not just kids.

There’s a lot of talking, organizing, but nothing is really HAPPENING at NASA right now. Hence the commercial interest in the Google Lunar X Prize (in my opinion.) My LPI internship adviser is now the chief scientist for one of the X Prize teams, because he’s not waiting for NASA to get around to getting back to the Moon. There’s a lot of disgruntled scientists (I know, I saw them at the LPSC, in 2000 and 2003) who’ve been living on crumbs of hope, project to project, grant to grant, but how long can that really sustain you?

Since I turned my back on the scientific community, I’m going to write science fiction and go to the Moon whenever the heck I want. :P For whatever non-scientific flippant reason I want. And stay as long as I want.

So for once, for a change, I think Aldrin’s full of crap. Usually I’m pretty much on his side, he’s a great advocate for spaceflight… but people need more than realism. They need hope, dreams… things to inspire them. They need the bar set too high, to give them something to shoot for. They also need to see something happening, and if the space program can’t provide that, they’ll go elsewhere. And they will. And they are.

I rewrote the Common Themes About section earlier this week. While conversing with my best friend and my husband about that day’s post, my reasons for posting it, and posting things here in general, I finally and fully understood this site’s mission statement, which is:

From the dawn of the Space Age to the present moment, spaceflight has a profound influence on culture. Images of space and space exploration inspire awe and enthusiasm in each generation, and over time they percolate into our everyday lives and society as a whole. From stylized hints in industrial design to literal interpretations, from the mundane to the obscure, spaceflight is all around us.

Common Themes explores the influence of spaceflight and space exploration — also astronomy and science fiction — on aspects of human civilization and culture.

I knew when I first thought up this blog that space and spaceflight have a considerable, even profound influence on our culture; in the United States and around the world, objects, designs and works of art influenced by space/spaceflight pop up regularly. I never really made the connection of why that was.

It’s because space and spaceflight are awe-inspiring.

We may not want to pay for it when voting time comes around, but here in the US, public support for the space program is startlingly high and strangely consistent. You can’t help but feel… something… when you look at an image of a far-off galaxy, when you see video footage of the Space Shuttle launching, when you look up at the Moon. It stirs something within each of us. I believe it’s different for everyone, but that internal lurch is why I post here. It certainly does something to me!

I will be posting some amazing images of space and spaceflight, with the intent to inspire awe. The space-themed things I feature on Common Themes come from that feeling you get when you look at these images. If they didn’t strike someone with awe, sometime, nobody would paint the Moon, or work spiral galaxies into jewelry, or print thousands of variations of comics with stylized rockets, daring astronauts and buxom space beauties

Nothing I reproduce here would EXIST without that awe and inspiration.

Regular post series will continue as usual; I’m simply augmenting them with some larger perspective. I hope you enjoy them! To kick things off, this image was featured on June 22 (much larger version of this image available there for download.)

Big, beautiful, barred spiral galaxy NGC 1300 lies some 70 million light-years away on the banks of the constellation Eridanus. This Hubble Space Telescope composite view of the gorgeous island universe is one of the largest Hubble images ever made of a complete galaxy. NGC 1300 spans over 100,000 light-years and the Hubble image reveals striking details of the galaxy’s dominant central bar and majestic spiral arms. In fact, on close inspection the nucleus of this classic barred spiral itself shows a remarkable region of spiral structure about 3,000 light-years across. Unlike other spiral galaxies, including our own Milky Way, NGC 1300 is not presently known to have a massive central black hole.