The Secret of the Ninth Planet.

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don't start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep.

Mary Roach, Packing for Mars

On July 14th, NASA's New Horizons probe did a flyby of Pluto, which resulted in a treasure trove of information about the erstwhile ninth planet and its five moons, and is considered to have been a resounding success in adding to our limited catalogue of data for the outer reaches of the solar system.  But, you know what my first thought was when I heard about the flyby?

I wish we were doing this with people.

Yes, people are not the ideal tool for space exploration.  As per the opening quote form Packing for Mars, people are a problem when it comes to life in space, and I can't deny that NASA is doing a brilliant job of expanding our scientific knowledge of the solar system with automated probes and robotic rovers that are indifferent to the difficulties involved.  But ultimately, space exploration has to include the goal of having human beings travel to the same destinations – otherwise, we’re just watching it on TV.

- Sid

P.S. The title of this posting is an homage to a 1959 young adult novel by Donald A. Wollheim which was part of the science fiction selection at my grade school library. I don't normally provide the sources for the blog titles (and most of them do reference other genre material) but Wollheim's novel has a bit of a special place in my heart, and I felt that it deserved a bit of recognition.