With her column titled Outer space is our neighbourhood, Michelle Stirling-Anosh has grabbed my attention — again.
Stirling-Anosh states that President Barack Obama recently cancelled the U.S. flight and exploration program and she gives an overview of possible consequences. With no shuttle, no manned space flight program, there will be no way for us to go out into space.
She says Obama claims, “We can rely on the convenient services of the Russians to boost us up there, or private industry.” She continues, “but there is virtually no private space industry.”
Citing advances we have made in design, engineering and technology, largely because of space exploration, she says, “It’s about constantly pushing the envelope.”
So her proposed solution is that the western nations, led by Canada, unite and create a kind of reverse lend-lease program with the US. If the American aren’t going to use their low Earth orbit facilities and tools for a decade, let us use them, finance them, keep them up and keep the innovations alive.
More than 100 years ago, Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, was certainly “pushing the envelope” when she wrote: “Whatever furnishes the semblance of an idea governed by its principle, furnished food for thought through music, mathematics, thought passes naturally from effect back to cause . . . observation, invention, study and original thought are expansive and should promote the growth of mortal mind out of itself, out of all that is mortal.”
She also wrote, “Reason is the most active human faculty.”
Cecile Hanna
Red Deer