The Near-Earth Asteroids: Our Next Interplanetary Destinations

G. L. Matloff. (1998), JBIS, 51, pp.267-274

Refcode: 1998.51.267

Abstract:

Space travel, especially by humans, seems to be a very large-scale affair likely to be dominated for a long time by the wishes of governments and multi-national consortiums, not by profit-seeking corporations or individuals seeking to emigrate to, or create, new worlds. Such a model makes it easier to understand the space events of the 1960s and thereafter. During the Apollo Program, men did not venture to the Moon seeking to explore space and begin the spread of terrestrial civilisation and human culture into the universe. The goals of that programme were purely geopolitical. America sought to “beat” the Soviet Union to the goal of a lunar landing and thereby re-establish its technological supremacy in world eyes. When that goal was accomplished, American (and Russian) motivations turned elsewhere; it no longer seemed necessary to political planners to sustain national space efforts at pre-1970 levels.