NASA prepares for launch of satellite that will search for planets beyond solar system.

The impacts of the space programs over the past seven decades are gigantic. EVERY electronic advancement made since the late 1950's has in some way been connected to and dependent upon the space program. One way to visualize the difference those programs have made is to consider what your life would be like technologically if the space program had never existed. Life would be similar to what it was like in the early 1960's or at best the 1970's. There would have been little impetus to develop the electronics we now find in our computers, HDTVs, iPhones, cars, or everything else we now take for granted. You can thank the space programs for every conceivable technological convenience you use in your everyday life now. We can no more predict what advances will happen or how they will benefit our societies over the next decades, than those who lived in the late 1950's or early 1960's could have predicted the impact of what they were doing in space then. But it's a safe bet, new space endeavors will serve to enhance our lives in ways that are totally beyond our imaginations now. I vote for expansion of science and space programs in every conceivable way.

 

My gripe here isn't about technological advances and discoveries made during the space program (which I'm the first to acknowledge), but about the nonsensical faux mystique which has built up around it. Ridiculous crap like this for instance . . .

"Astronomers baffled by distant galaxy void of dark matter"

https://www.9news.com.au/world/2018...baffled-by-distant-galaxy-void-of-dark-matter

 

And I think Russians will cry :_(

 

According to the movie Europa has primordial life and the monolith warned us it was forbidden to go there.