It’s so old-fashioned!

...Speaking of bullshit, from a scientific perspective, the direction that America’s space program has taken in recent decades is seriously wrong-headed. During the Bush Administration, things got worse still: for the Bushies, science was an enemy.

Early indications are that Mr. Obama understands the value of science and has made wise decisions—in particular concerning our space program.

Many scientists complain that, Buzz Aldrin to the contrary, if we seek to attain scientific knowledge, we must abandon our prejudice in favor of manned space flight, which is both expensive and unnecessary. Robots can do almost anything astronauts can do, and they can do it much more cheaply.

Initially, in this regard, America’s space program had some stunning, though now appreciated, victories.

Yeah, but didn‘t we get caught with our pants down by the Soviets with their Sputnik? Weren’t we playing nothing but catch-up?!

As Bob Park explained yesterday (What’s New), that’s not really what happened:

Launched on 4 Oct 1957, [the USSR’s] Sputnik carried no instruments. It just beeped…. But a month later, Sputnik 2 carried a Geiger tube and a radio transmitter to relay the Geiger output back to Earth. It also carried a tape recorder to store data when the satellite is over the horizon, but it wasn't working on launch day.

Soviet scientists placed a call directly to Premier Nikita Khrushchev requesting permission to delay the launch for a day, but Khrushchev refused; he wanted to announce another successful launch at a meeting of heads-of-state the next day….
…
On 31 Jan 1958, only four months after Sputnik, the US launched Explorer 1 carrying an experiment designed by James Van Allen, Physics Chair at the University of Iowa. It was just a Geiger tube, a radio transmitter, and a recorder – but the recorder worked.

Data from a full orbit confirmed the existence of charged particle bands around Earth, now known as the Van Allen belts. It was the first major discovery from beyond the ionosphere.

Soviet scientists were crushed; only four months after Sputnik, the US had taken the lead in space science and has never relinquished it.

Manned space flight remains a sideshow. In the end, all that will endure is the science. James Van Allen was the true American space hero. During [my] long talk with Jim a year before his death in 2006, he summed-up manned space flight: "It's so old-fashioned."