This is the sort of thing they need to be able to handle to keep this thing up there long term.

While I am a fan of the idea of kick starting manned space flight past the boundaries of the Moon, it wouldn't bode well if the ISS fell apart while we were working on the next generation of manned space vehicles.

I've made no secret that I am an unabashed fan of space exploration, and manned space exploration in particular. I am highly in favor of this proposed plan to get to Mars. In fact, the Asteroid Belt should be the goal after Mars. We should work on discovering how to survive and thrive off-Earth without having to maintain a supply line to Earth. The supply line is currently what makes it so tough right now -- we have to carry absolutely everything with us.

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We are fast approaching the anniversary of a very sad event. Actually, there are at least 3 space-related disaster anniversaries coming up -- the Apollo 1 Fire on January 27th, 1967, the Challenger Disaster on January 28th, 1986, and the Columbia Disaster on February 1st, 2003. I was reminded of this by, of all things, a West Wing rerun. Our local NBC affiliate is running old West Wings during the day on Sunday, and I caught the rerun of "Galileo." The bit before the main credit sequence, when Sam Seaborn rewrites the NASA intro, that speech is among my top 5 West Wing moments. I was sucked in at that point, watching up to the point when the President was handed a piece of paper announcing that they'd lost the signal from the craft.

Losing the signal on a spacecraft has always had some significance to me, especially with the number of Mars ships we've lost track of in recent years. But it all became much more horrifying listening to Mission Control trying to raise Columbia after we'd all seen the footage of the breakup.

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I loved "Master and Commander" when I saw it, and one of the things that impressed me about it was how they portrayed the existence of the ship and crew. The movie starts up with the ship taking a hellacious pounding from an enemy that was just barely seen. It was uncertain that the ship could survive in the aftermath. But what choice did the crew have? The ship was the only thing that kept them alive on the ocean. Losing the ship meant losing their lives, so they fixed it. They worked against long odds, and fixed it.

I can't help but draw parallels between what they did in the movie and what we're trying to do on the International Space Station, only the situation is far more dire, and small things like an air leak are much more scary. It's not like they can sail to the shore and find supplies to rebuild the ship. We have to launch the most complex machines we've ever built, loaded with supplies, and hope that they get there successfully.

We've gotten very good at pulling off the space flight thing. Not as good as we're going to get, but good enough that the general public is losing respect for the dangers. We've launched the Shuttle more than 110 times, with the best people on Earth aboard, and how often do we notice?

I for one won't be taking it for granted. And I hope we keep moving it forward.

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One final thing. I'm not sure that NASA directly executing on the proposed plans to go to the Moon and Mars are the best ideas. We certainly don't have the aerospace industry we had in the 50's, 60's and 70's anymore. And I'm not sure we can or should recreate it.

I think we should do something more along the lines of what is happening with the XPrize. We should come up with a graduated series of goals and prizes, and let the natural competitive nature of humans drag us into the next level of aerospace technology.

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