Can you hear me Major Tom? Chris Hadfield's Impact on Space Exploration

Earlier this week, International Space Station resident Commander Chris Hadfield, a Canadian citizen, came back to earth, but not without first creating a series of defining moments for modern space exploration. It was not because what he discovered while in his six month stay, but because he did what not many astronauts had done before: he made the ISS accessible to everyone, from the comfort of our earthly dwellings. He did a social media blitz of sorts. He would post daily pictures of fly-bys across the globe, short videos demoing how things we do on earth differ in space: how flame burns without gravity, how crying looks like in near-zero-G, how they sleep, how they use the bathroom, how they keep in shape and so forth. He did several social media live Q&A events, including a reddit AMA a few months ago.

With millions of followers across the major social media outlets, Chris Hadfield (and a small pre- and post-production team on earth), released his grand finalé, his Opus Major, if you will: a cover of David Bowie's Space Oddity, filmed and performed by Hadfield himself aboard the ISS.

To date, more than 13,500,000 unique viewers have watched the amazing video Hadfield and co. put together. And I sure hope, for the sake of awareness and education that the video continues to spread like a wildfire in a hay farm.

My description of the video, as I previously posted on Google+, goes as follows:

I don't think a music video has moved me so much as Commander +Chris Hadfield 's cover of +David Bowie 's Space Odddity. I've watched it no less than 6 or 7 times since it was first released. It really is perfect, insofar as transporting you there without actually being there. The conflict between sheer beauty of earthly backdrops with the desolate, sterile blackness of space. The human desire to reach and live in space, away from earth, in a parallel dimension unbound from gravity and other quotidian earth-bound forces. The conflicting feelings of enjoying the moment on the station while fully aware the clock is ticking and finally the bittersweet realization that time has come to re-join the human race.

Now, what really matters though, is Commander Hadfield's impact on public and political perception of space exploration. If his sharing his experience with millions on a daily basis persuaded the constituency and politicians that space exploration is a worthy expense, that it's not just for the multi-millionaire elite, or for the erudite, that tangible benefits can be drawn from the mere fact of being in space for extended periods of time, then Chris Hadfield's efforts will not be for naught. The U.S. space program is currently in a fairly poor shape, and I hope what Commander Hadfield has done is the right medicine needed to revivify it.

The Long (Space Age) Hiatus Needs To End

Recently I've been reading and watching documentaries about the Voyager mission. The more I've learned about it, the more flabbergasted I've become at the long hiatus we, as a society, have taken about exploring outer space. Sure, we all awe at the breathtaking images the venerable Hubble Space Telescope and certainly felt utmost excitement when the Mars Pathfinder sent the images of our red planetary neighbor. However, at this point, I think we have all but abandoned space research. We, as society, leave that task  to the academicians and practitioners at NASA (or its subsidiaries) without much care whether they take their funding away, or budget constraints put missions on indefinite stand-by. I find perplexing that with the incredible advances in science and technology in the last twenty years, we don't have plans to have a human on mars in, say, the next ten years. We are perching on information from a mission that was conceived and launched thirty-plus years ago. Those people, that generation didn't have the technology we have today -- not even in their remote dreams. They had to MAKE the technology. They endeavored in a mission they had anecdotal information about. They pushed forward with a lot of theoretical knowledge, but very little, if any, practical sapience. They painstakingly designed gear to withstand the trip, and then when they found out that those specs were not going to be sufficient to survive the hazards of inter planetary travel, they redesigned and retooled it pretty much on the fly: everything from electronics, to the vessel itself. There was a huge push and pressure to get it right. It was much more than seeing the giants of the solar system "up close". It was about expanding the bounds of human knowledge. And at that, I would say, the Voyager Mission was a colossal success that caused "shockwaves" we still hear about  to this day.

Why should we not do that again but with loftier goals?  Why can't we think about and beyond of what's known? We have gained a substantial amount of knowledge and technology since the Voyager Mission set sail, in terms of materials science, computer science, electronics, telecommunications and so forth. Why not harness that in order to learn more about our solar system? Let's send a drone to do "Recon", if you will, of Venus' crust? Let's learn more about Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. Let's send space craft there, take samples and bring them back! Imagine being able to see/examine/study a piece of the crust of one of Jupiter's moons? How about sending probes to Neptune and Triton. You get the idea: let's expand the bounds of human knowledge again! If we can spend days musing about HTML semantics, distributed databases, metrics and code poetry, we surely can support those who spend their days musing about the exact chemical make-up of a distant planet or what would it take to put a human on Mars (and back). I think it's crucial we get the Space Age back to the forefront and as a priority for the advancement of the human race.