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Unread 24-06-2002, 04:01
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Slightly humorous story about global warming & space explor.

Posted by Patrick Dingle at 05/01/2001 3:26 PM EST


College Student on team #639, Red B^2, from Ithaca High School and Cornell University.



Thought this true story might be slightly interesting or humorous to some of you engineers (and especially NASA employees or Fuel Cell engineers) out there...

I had the opportunity to view Captain Jim Lovell (captain, Apollo 13, among others) give a lecture a couple weeks ago on campus. Unfortunately, his lecture happened to come to campus at the same time a group of Kyoto Now! Green Party activists were trying to get the university to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to pre-1990 levels on campus.

Anyway, on to the story. Lovell gives his hour-long lecture... He's an outstanding lecturer, and it was very interesting. After the lecture, there are a half hour of Q&A. Several questions asked about space exploration etc... Then, a lady in her mid 30s gets to the microphone. She first mentions how expensive the space program is, and questions (rhetorically) why the united states should continue to fund space exploration when, and I quote, "our own planet is dying." Next, she suggests that we should be spending the money on saving the planet. How money reduces greenhouse gas emissions, I have absolutely no clue... but she seemed to say that we should be spending money reducing greenhouse gas emissions. At this point she has been talking for about 2 minutes, and the audience is talking to each other and many people start to yell things at her and such. A security guard then asks her to ask her question. She then proceeds to claim that the space program itself contributes to global warming, and she quickly asked for Lovell to respond before she was thrown out.

Now I mentioned Lovell is a great speaker, but he knew exactly what he was talking about, and responded to every single point this lady made. His response must have been about 15 minutes to this one "question". First, he responds to her suggestion that money should be spent on saving the planet. He first mentions how the economy works... Spending money on the space program puts taxpayers' money in the hands of engineering companies and manufacturers, etc... and the money goes right back into the economy. Money doesn't disappear once spent, but circulates to other places. But his main point was that reducing greenhouse emissions is not both not a viable solution (since with current power technology it's directly proportional to the amount of energy produced) and there is no way for money to decrease emissions. Additionally, he points out that funding scientific research such as NASA puts money right in the hands of the researchers who research alternate means of energy. Finally, he responds to her comment about the space program contributing to global warming. As he mentioned many times in his lecture, he points out that the space shuttle and apollo missions, (and all other NASA missions) are powered by hydrogen/oxygen fuel cells, which have water as the only biproduct. In fact, it was an explosion in two of Apollo 13's three oxygen tanks that forced them to return to Earth. Lovell gets a stanging ovation after responding to this lady's comments.

Of course, these are not the real reasons the government should fund NASA... after all, NASA sponsers FIRST teams.

Patrick, who thinks if we send one rich person into space each year for $20 million, that is enough additional cash for NASA to fully fund ($50000 budget) 400 FIRST teams per year.


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