In Search of the Next Frontier

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NASA Turns 50

After a half a century at work, NASA is assessing its past and looking ahead to navigate its future.

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"What we've put in place is a system capable of taking human beings around the inner solar system," he said. "One day, I have no doubt, you'll see people a million miles from home servicing a telescope."

Or maybe they'll help build that radio telescope on the far side of the moon.

"You can literally roll out a radio telescope on the ground. It could be kilometers wide. You would roll out strips of antenna," Griffin said.

Why go at all? Partly it's prestige, Griffin said. It's definitely a strategic move. History tends to be written by countries that explore. Griffin emphasizes that we won't know in advance how space will be useful, or even whether it will be useful at all. It could be like Mount Everest -- or it could be more like one of those North Sea oil platforms. Or maybe even like North America, a resource-rich place colonized by people from around the world.

Griffin asks us to be cautious about what we presume: In 1830, Daniel Webster in the U.S. Senate decried wasteful spending on Western lands. The West, after all, was just a desert.

"Will the solar system be a place to live, a place to work? Will it be restricted to a tourist attraction? Or will it have no value at all? Nobody has the answer," Griffin said. But he added, "As technology changes, the definition of what is useful also changes."

He panned back for the cosmic view of why we go.

"Fundamentally, it's about long-term human survival," he said. "If we believe that human life is worth preserving, then we have to face the fact that the history of life on Earth is the history of extinction events. Diversification of our portfolio is a good thing in the long run."

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