Energizing as it could be to feel the thunder of the van’s motors at Cape Canaveral, or to get the sparkle of the space station as it passes upward, or to see a little meanderer moving over a stone great many miles away, it isn’t the equipment that moves us. It’s the space travelers with their cheeks extended by G powers, the space explorers letting us know what lightning resembles from space, and the researchers bouncing with merriment on the grounds that their lander contacts down securely on Mars.
We aren’t recommending that NASA resort to contrivances. “We are at this point not in the ‘heartfelt’ time of spaceflight,” says John M. Logsdon, overseer of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “At this point, space should be more than public diversion.” But NASA shouldn’t be embarrassed about profiting by the PR allure of its representatives.
Furthermore, the organization should quit imagining that it is persuaded exclusively by science. Barely anybody accepted that an examination including just one subject-who was reluctant to turn over each of his clinical records-could contribute a lot to how we might interpret maturing. However NASA demanded that John Glenn’s flight was only for science. Furthermore, when the office was thinking about sending an all-female transport team into space-a curiosity sure to draw in press consideration authorities demanded the objective was just to concentrate on distinctions in sexual orientation.