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Florida as a whole doesn’t hold a lot of appeal for me: a vast flat strip-mall full of beaches, theme parks, swamps and cops in pastel polo shirts driving Ferraris. But there is one place amidst this general tawdriness that geniuinely impressed and inspired: Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.

A Saturn V is immodest in size, brutally functional in its design and arrogant in intent. Seen up close at KSC, it’s a completely wonderful machine, the engineering backbone of the single most impressive technical feat in the history of our species.

Here’s me standing next to one of the Rocketdyne F-1 first stage motors. A Saturn V had FIVE of these puppies, each one of them developing more thrust than an entire space shuttle:

On the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, there’s been debate about whether humans should go back to the Moon, or further. A counter-argument often used is that manned spaceflight is a waste of money, and that we should be focusing our attention, resources and energy on solving problems on Earth first.

Such reasoning is flawed. The opportunity cost of not going back to the Moon or to Mars is NOT prolonged starvation, war or global warming. Cancelling the $100 billion ISS would never result in that $100 billion being spent instead on AIDS research or education in African countries.  And aerospace engineers wouldn’t suddenly turn their enthusiasms towards creating new forms of clean energy.

But there is a pot of money and a set of expertise that could profitably be turned to space exploration: defense spending. 

A 20% cut in the US defence budget ($515 billion in 2009) would fund current NASA activities ($18.7 billion) six times over.  And most of the contractors who might lose business through defence cuts (firms like Lockheed, Boeing and BAE) would be exactly the firms with the technology and skills to bid for work in an expanded space programme.

This is not just an American effort, however. The same level defence cuts applied across Europe, Japan, Russia and China, and the subsequent redeployment of brain power and manpower could be transformative for the world economy.

By rights, a space programme should be a politician’s wet dream. High-value jobs. New technologies. Adding to the knowledge economy. And it’s not just jobs for scientists and pilots…there’s thousands of factory floor jobs involved in stitching spacesuits and running wiring through space capsules. The French for fiscal stimulus package is “plan de relance“. Relance – re-launch.

Like Robyn Gallagher, I’d love to see men and women walk on the Moon or Mars during my lifetime. A Mars programme will certainly have to be an international project. The Americans did it on their own with a Saturn V, some chewing gum and a pocket calculator in 1969. In the 21st century it’ll be even better, because we’ll all be along for the ride. To infinity and beyond!

Apollo 17 photos from NASA / Apollo Lunar Surface Journal

Beck – Leave Me on the Moon
From Kill the Moonlight Soundtrack [Buy] [emusic]

Seeing a Saturn V rocket is like visiting a cathedral.

Mostly we’re pretty dumb as a species – gifted with enormous intelligence that is used to find more efficient ways of pillaging our planet or blowing each other up.

Human beings can accomplish truly astonishing things when we put our minds to it and work together – the Saturn V is that dream made real.

While my aunt’s away on summer holiday, it’s nice to know that NASA is keeping an eye on her house.

STS-116 astronauts Robert L. Curbeam, Jr. and Christer Fuglesang admire my aunt’s rose garden.

(Original and hi-res image available on Wikipedia. And for a variation on this photo featuring an unexplainable local kiwi joke, see David Slack’s blog.)

One of the more unusual stories to emerge from the tsunami crisis was the tale of an Indian helicopter attacked by indigenous Andamanese on Sentinel Island with bows and arrows. And although there were early fears that large numbers of the Andaman’s indigenous population had been wiped out by the tidal waves, many are supposing that they were able to survive by reading the natural signals of tide, water and observing the behaviour of animals…

The image is bizarre, but arresting – the great steel bird of the 21st century confronted by the weapons of a culture that reaches back into the paleaolithic. When speaking about cultures and places far from our own, words like “unspoilt” or phrases like “the world’s last paradise” are to be avoided. However the Andamans and Nicobar Islands must surely be one of the few places in the world where we, with a postcolonial conciousness, can actually try to prevent the worst excesses of encroachment on indigenous peoples….

But amidst the human tragedy and our apparent insignificance against the forces of the universe, let’s remember that just occasionally, us humans can make and do some pretty amazing things (one of them is tabbed web browsing in Firefox) NASA’s two Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have been crawling around the planet for a year, drilling, taking pictures and generally doing some interplanetary science. Both robots have lasted three times longer than their designed longevity of 90 days. Roll on the launch of Huygens into Titan’s atmosphere !