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I want to talk about space travel, once again. NASA's mission back to the moon, Artemis, is slated to launch in less than a week!
Luckily from my perspective, it seems that space travel hasn't been THAT politicized by the culture war, yet. Yes the left and environmentalists hate it, but it hasn't become a hot button, tribal trigger in the way gun control, or abortion, or other major culture war issues are.
Ideally I think space travel will continue to fly under the radar, and slowly get better and better. I know there are some fascinating scientific projects unfolding around space like algae to produce plastic in space, plans for asteroid mining, various organic compounds that can only be created in zero gee, etc. Also of course we now have Space Force, and a renewed space race with China seems to be heating up, potentially.
I'm curious what folks here think about space - are we optimistic that space travel and research will become a genuine market in the next few decades? What are the political fault lines people seeing potentially being an issue here?
The crew is diverse. The backup crew is equally diverse. That increases the chances of NASA pulling off a Challenger substantially in my book. The organizations that care about diversity seems to underperform in execution of their core mission.
Why? For me peaceful space exploration is the least controversial thing - the resources it consumes are negligible, no pollution, huge moral lifter.
We need to explore space. We need to do more stuff in space. And the scientific bang for buck is extraordinary.
There are enough women, Canadians, and blacks that they can find someone competent, and all of them want to be astronauts. Diversity in itself doesn’t mean much.
You would think so, but my experience going to an elite university says otherwise, at least as to blacks.
As far as women go, the issue I see is that the pool of women who are seriously interested in becoming astronauts is surely far far smaller than the pool of men. So while the (non-minority) female professors I had in college were basically competent, I'm not sure that it would be the same way with astronauts.
I'm reminded of an incident a few years ago where a female astronaut was arrested over an apparent kidnapping plan she had hatched over a love triangle. Yes, this is an n=1 situation, but still. The pool of wannabe male astronauts is large enough that anyone with the slightest hint of this kind of psychological issue can be eliminated.
I don’t think there should be women astronauts. But I don’t think minorities, women, and Canadians on the ship will cause it to blow up mid flight, either.
I would agree it's unlikely however it certainly raises the odds of a calamity. The other issue is that every DEI hire paves the way to more and more DEI hires, which can be expected to result in disasters which would not have otherwise happened. Separately, in order to meet DEI quotas, organizations tend to de-emphasize objective measures of competency. Which means that everyone is worse, on average, even white men.
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I once encountered a grizzled mariner who assured me that women aboard a ship are still bad luck, even in current year.
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