I recently read a post on Gizmodo, An Astronaut Explains How We’ll Fall In Love With Space Again by Leroy Chiao, their official astronaut blogger. In it he lists six bullet points. I think all of his points are valid, but this one made the biggest impression:
The Constellation Program was a reasonable path, five years ago, when the Vision for Space Exploration was first formulated. Since then, budget shortfalls have caused significant delays. Moreover, the goals evolved into a focus on getting astronauts back to the Moon, to the development of the Ares family of rockets and the Orion spacecraft. The public generally is bored with going back to the Moon, since we already did this forty years ago.
[The Constellation Program’s goal is ultimately to put humans on Mars.]I agree with Chiao; generally, going back to the moon makes folks go “eh.”
Maybe it’s just me, or maybe it’s just my generation, but I find space exploration thrilling. I was eight when Neil Armstrong took mankind’s first steps on something other than the Earth; witnessing that at that young age was remarkable. When I watch Al Reinert’s For All Mankind now, 40+ years after those first steps, even after seeing countless images from decades of space exploration, when I watch the moon rover sequence with that driving Brian Eno music–jeez, people, these guys are on the moon, on the FREAKING MOON. HELLO? ANYONE HOME? THESE MEN! ARE DRIVING!! ON THE MOON!!!–I am left speechless and filled with wonder and inspiration and the belief that if a bunch of geeky dudes with crew cuts and slide rules in their pocket protectors can make that happen, then there’s very little we as a species can’t make happen. End poverty? Doable. End hunger? Doable. End illiteracy? Doable. Health care for everyone? Doable!
This is naive, I know.
But what I’m saying is people do need to be inspired to explore, and by “explore” I mean find and follow their vision, big or small, whether that’s putting people on Mars or making a film, cloning old growth trees for large scale watershed restoration projects or planting a tree in their backyard so that one day it might support a tree house for their children.
I long to make A Life’s Work a wonder-inducing experience for the viewer as For All Mankind is a wonder-inducing experience for me. That’s daunting and I suspect I am doomed to fail. That isn’t going to stop me from trying, though. That’s the nature of being inspired, after all.
Good teachers have inspired me. Good art inspires me. Where do you find inspiration?