Goodnight, moon travel

It’s time to save planet Earth. And our inspiration, once again, comes from JFK

In 2004, President Bush announced his plan for sending humans back to the moon and eventually Mars. Last week, Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, proposed a manned mission to “Mars by the 60th anniversary year of our Apollo 11 flight,” in part to study geologic-time-scale climate change on the red planet. Long before then, however, our struggle to deal with rapid, human-caused climate change here on Earth will overwhelm even a modest effort to put humans beyond planetary orbit again.
Humanity has only two paths forward. We voluntarily switch to a low-carbon economy over the next two decades, or the reality of catastrophic climate change and peak oil forces us to desperately start doing so by the end of the 2020s. The only difference between the two paths is that the first one spares our children and grandchildren, and their children and grandchildren, untold misery. It creates a sustainable future where activities like manned space travel can be contemplated again.

More than ever we need to employ our leadership in science and industry to solve the mysteries of peace and security for the good of all women and men. But not by returning to space. Our top planetary mission for the foreseeable future must be to stop destroying the one climate hospitable to the one civilization that we know of in the entire galaxy.

Salon