Plus: Making better sense of Earth imagery
By Dan Robitzski
Welcome back to our weekly newsletter highlighting the opinions and perspectives of the SpaceNews community.
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The first crewed mission to Mars cannot be NASA-centric or America-centric. "To send humans to Mars and bring them back safely, we must go not as a nation, but as a planet," wrote Adriana C. Ocampo Uría, a California State University planetary scientist and space ethicist, in a recent commentary article. She was responding to another recent commentary on the scientific and engineering challenges of a crewed Mars mission to point out that the matters of ethics and global governance are still missing from the conversation.
"Mars is not an American frontier. It is a universal heritage site. The first human footprint on Martian soil must represent a species, not a flag. If we launch a crew without a global mandate, we risk bringing our terrestrial squabbles to an alien world — and that is a failure no engineering fix can remedy," she wrote.
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman posted about the article on social media, vehemently disagreeing with the notion of what he framed as greater bureaucracy guiding space exploration.
Read the full commentary here. |
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For decades, Earth observation's challenge was gathering enough data, enough images of the Earth, to prove useful. Now, with a flood of observation data coming in, the bigger challenge is finding ways to make measurements and analysis that actually make that data useful, according to a commentary article by Nicole Toigo, president of EarthDaily Federal.
Better tools are needed, Toigo argued, in order to make sense of what's being imaged on the ground. What's changing and how quickly, for example, which can make a significant tactical difference for military operations.
"The history of Earth observation was about learning to see. The next chapter is about learning to measure, with enough consistency and continuity to turn observation into foresight," Toigo wrote. "The world does not need more maps. It needs the ability to predict outcomes. For those who bear responsibility for national security, that is, ultimately, a measurement problem."
Read the full article here.
SpaceNews is committed to publishing our community’s diverse perspectives. Whether you’re an academic, executive, engineer or even just a concerned citizen of the cosmos, send your arguments and viewpoints to opinion (at) spacenews.com to be considered for publication online or in our next magazine. If you have something to submit, read some of our recent opinion articles and our submission guidelines to get a sense of what we’re looking for. The perspectives shared in these opinion articles are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent their employers or professional affiliations. |
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