By Nancy
“We choose to go to the moon,” declared President John F. Kennedy, in his famous speech in 1962. Sixty years after Kennedy’s speech, NASA is once again getting ready to send humans to the moon. No doubt, many people are wondering: why go back? Here are the four main reasons:
1. There’s a lot of science to be done on the moon.
What can be gathered by today’s astronauts can tell us a lot more than the rock samples brought back by Apollo astronauts decades ago.
2. It’s a stepping stone to Mars.
A blueprint can be obtained at the moon of how to do these things sustainably that can be applied to more distant destinations.
3. It could spur new technologies.
Dozens of new technologies created to go into space and to the moon have brought substantial benefits to people on Earth – spawning everything from hand-held computers to insulin pumps and freeze-dried food.
4. It has the potential to inspire a generation of engineers and scientists.
While numbers are impossible to quantify, according to a survey even back in 2009 of 800 researchers, “the Moon landings deserve credit for motivating a large fraction of today’s scientists … who have published in Nature in the past three years.”
(Adapted from NPR’s September 3, 2022 article: “NASA is set to return to the moon. Here are 4 reasons to go back”)
Despite decline in government share of research programs in recent decades, some of the most brilliant scientific and engineering innovations, such as James Web Space Telescope, Large Hadron Collider and LIGO (gravitational wave detector,) are still exclusively supported by government.