Space exploration should not be limited

I’m still in favour of things like the Mars Project, I’m still in favour of things like Cassini Hoegens, obviously things have to be balanced, it’s one of the reasons why I am genuinely in favour of unmanned space exploration. There is a lot of glamour, a lot of public interest when you send astronauts to places, but the costs and the risks are such that it is very tricky. I’ve interviewed various Apollo and other astronauts at points, and again some of you might have seen the film Apollo 13, and I was talking to Tom Hanks, I’m just going to name drop here, about this and he was saying….and he had spoken to Neil Armstrong the first man on the moon….who not all people get to speak to, he said look what you’ve got to understand guys, is we went to the moon with basically WWII technology. We went because John F. Kennedy said, “we will land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s” so they went there, and we kind of got ahead of ourselves, and now there is this sort of expectation that we should be sending more people into space. You know we’ve not had anybody….human beings on the moon for 30 years now which is incredible. But it’s because we are actually catching up, we are still developing as we’ve seen with the space shuttle disasters, we don’t quite have the gear to do it. We are much better to do unmanned exploration, and we are learning more about the galaxy that we are in, and all of these explorations in space have actually had benefits down on Earth.

And although these things are costly missions, if you start to actually restrict ourselves as a species, and stop ourselves exploring and kind of start hemming us in, then we are already staring at the brink of defeat. You never know what you are going to find around the next corner when you are exploring, you never know where the next discovery is going to come from. If there is one thing that the history of science teaches you, is the person who says, right I’m going to find a cure for hunger, or a cure for cancer, is rarely the person who does it. It’s the person who is studying some bizarre property of a squid found off Samoa, or somebody else who is investigating the magnetic properties of plastic, and suddenly they go, hold on if I connect that with that, and I work with this one over here, then suddenly you’ve got something. So you have to keep doing this exploring, and it shouldn’t come down to a choice between you know is it going to be going to Mars or saving the planet, you should be able to do both.