Jocks v. Nerds - Space Edition

I've been meaning to write about this for awhile, ever since NASA announced a month or so ago that they were implementing a three-stage program of space exploration in the 21st century. The program, Constellation, goes a little something like this:

1. Incorporate new technology into equipment to be tested during extended space flights.

2. Return man to the Moon and create a "Moon base."

3. Send human beings to land on Mars.

It's a cool, carefully calculated plan following the scientific method. Baby steps into the final frontier, testing equipment and strategies for each following stage until we land on the Red Planet. But not everyone with space cred is excited by this plan.

Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon, wants to forgo the return to the Moon and just go for the big prize of landing on Mars. Essentially, his thinking is "we already did this - let's go after the unknown again and 'Boldly Go'." As Robert Zubrin, president of The Mars Society quipped in a CNN article about the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing:

"This idea that you have to know how to do it before you can commit yourself to the program is completely false...We didn't know that we could do Lewis and Clark successfully before we set them out."

And so here we see one of nature's timeless struggles played out - The Jocks v. The Nerds. The Nerds want to follow the scientific method and play it by the book, learning and growing to the eventual goal. Learn all the information, make a plan, enact - classic Scientific Method. The Jocks want the ball - they want to explore space, not study collect data, waiting and waiting until it's deemed perfectly safe (or as close as one can get strapping oneself to a missile) to proceed.

Now, while I like to think of myself as a "child of both worlds," I'm with the Space Jocks on this one. Look at the Constellation program's modeling - it's a higher tech Apollo program, and as noble as its aims may be...that's really lame. It's been 40 years since we landed on the Moon, and the best we can come up with is the same thing as before, but with airbags and cupholders? I like the idea of a "Moon base," but you're telling me we can't do both at once, sending humans to colonize the Moon while sending others our beyond her orbit? This slow and steady crap isn't cool anymore - if it ever was. President Kennedy set a deadline and pushed us to the lunar body. That's the spirit we need to move forward in.

We've known the geography of our own planet for so long now, I wonder if we as a species have gotten so bogged down in the science and study and safe comfort of our desk chairs that we have forgotten how to explore in the tradition of Polo, Columbus and Magellan, of Lewis and Clark, of Glenn, Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin. Get out of the labs boys and girls, it's time to be heroes for a generation again. It's not just about going - of course we'll get there someday. It's about the unknown and feeling the rush, the excitement of not knowing what will or could happen. It's about time we rediscover our need to "Boldly Go."

UPDATE: Lane Wallace over at The Atlantic has another take on NASA, the Moon and Mars, and space exploration, and asks why it needs to be exciting. I started about it earlier, but let me elaborate.

We want our heroes - people who seem courageous because of their actions. The greatest source of fear is in that of the Unknown, and the conquering of that fear is where Man can most greatly shine - our love of adventure, our passion to understand and accomplish what before we could not, our mortality. And that is why it automated robots and drones won't cut it, there isn't that in sitting behind a computer watching a streaming feed. For some that is enough, but for the Alphas, the Gamers, the Jocks - it will never replace "doing." Society idolizes those who go to the limit at risk of their own mortal lives and live to tell the tale. It inspires us and brings us hope. And that's why space exploration needs to be "exciting" - not because of money, or that people are sheep - but because this is one of the few things left that can be romanticized. We want or stories, our history, our legends. We need figures to inspire a new generation to continue what three men did walking on a dusty rock did 40 years ago after an incredible, uncertain journey. We need heroes.