Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Kevin Drum reports today on NASA's desire to start developing a nuclear-powered drive for space travel, presumably for a future manned mission to Mars. (He got his information from a Los Angeles Times article, to which registration is required for reading. I'm not registered and I blanched at providing the LA Times all the information that they say they needed for their registration, so I didn't bother and thus was not able to read the article in question.)

I'm really of mixed mind on this. It's always been my conviction that, if we don't kill everyone somehow, five or six hundred years from now this era that we're in right now will be seen as the time when the true Space Age began, when humanity first started on the road to leaving its home planet. It's always been my conviction that space travel and eventual colonization are absolutely essential to the long-term survival of our species; and thus, we should absolutely be devoting a substantial amount of our resources to establishing a permanent human presence in space, and then on the Moon, and so forth.

But on the other hand, I'm not sure if we've gone about it in anything resembling the right way. The International Space Station, currently under construction, is a low-orbit item that probably won't serve as any kind of long-term outpost; we've ignored the Moon entirely ever since we accomplished our real goal of beating the Russians there; so on and so forth. If we are to begin working on a manned mission to Mars, then I think such a mission needs to be performed not with the goal of "going because it is there", but rather, "going because we know we're going to have people living there". In short, I'd like to see NASA and our space industries shift from the going as their primary justifications, toward colonization.

So, if we're still interested in Mars (and we'd better be), for now our focus should be on robotic missions there. Instead of developing new propulsion systems for interplanetary travel, let's work on colonizing the Moon. Let's actually develop the "spaceplane", and start moving beyond the Shuttle -- whose core technology is approaching thirty years of age. I sometimes get the feeling, and this is one of those times, that NASA is trying to follow up the space-age equivalent of the Wright Brothers' flight at Kitty Hawk with the development of the SST.