Article Abstract:
The US government's civil space program must be reoriented if the erosion of public support for it is to be checked. Space projects with cultural values such as manned missions to explore and colonize the solar system should be curtailed in favor of economically feasible projects of direct public interest. The sooner the administrators stop trying to relive the 'golden age of space exploratiion' of the 1960s and 1970s, the sooner the nation will back the US space program in earnest.
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Article Abstract:
The US space program's projects are routinely plagued by cost overruns, unmet schedules and a scaling down of their capabilities. The promised performance of these projects are then not realized. A restructuring of the space program, NASA and the US government's space policy is inevitable due to the unsustainability of the present policy of striving towards manned exploration of the solar system led by the US. Such a restructuring would also solve the problems presented above.
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Article Abstract:
It is imperative that the importance of the Mission to Planet Earth be disseminated not only to legislators and scientists, but to the academe and through this, to the general population. New teaching methods to impart the relevant technologies, such as remote sensing and computers, are needed. Most important is the study and teaching of Earth System Science, which depicts our planet in terms of a unified system instead of different earth sciences.
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