Space exploration must continue – Walla Walla Union-Bulletin

I am a student at Garrison. We Americans often fantasize over our glorious future of space colonies and asteroid mining.

However, with the state of our space programs, accomplishing this is hardly possible. NASA has turned from a revolutionary space program that gave children dreams of being astronaut heroes to a mediocre waste of government funds and a tourist attraction.

When you think of astronauts you think of the 1960s, not anything that has happened recently. Our space program would be a humiliation to astronauts such as John Glenn, Neil Armstrong or Sally Ride.

They were astronauts who risked, and some who lost, their lives to explore and now after several generations of invention and innovation we have come to a standstill. It seems as though our generation is an awful case of writers block in the story of the human beings explorations and inventions.

We havent sent a human to space since July of 2011, which was over five years ago. We havent even been able to put a human on a different planet. The closest weve done to this is land a man on the moon, and that wasnt our generation, that was back when they needed large warehouses to hold a computer with the power of one of our servers.

We have computers that the early mission controls would have died for, and the best we could do with them is play video games. During the first launches technology was extremely limited, and they were still able to do things that were unimaginably complicated.

With our technology we should be able to achieve more than they ever would have been able to, yet we have done practically nothing.

In my opinion the solution is to encourage competition in the space industry and support private space companies. The most well known private company in this field is SpaceX, which is a perfect example of a type of company we need more of.

If there are more private space companies there will be a greater chance of a one of them doing something amazing, like landing a craft with humans on mars or something similar.

It is up to our generation to continue the legacy of those before us, and the way to do this is through private space companies.

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Space exploration must continue - Walla Walla Union-Bulletin