The Other Final Frontier
The United States has been out of the space shuttle business for a few months now, but the country is still seriously considering spending billions of dollars to send astronauts back to the moon, to Mars or to a nearby asteroid.
It’s heartening that the pioneering spirit behind crewed missions into outer space has not been dampened by the nation’s tide of red ink. But with price tags like $50 billion to return astronauts to the moon in the next decade, there’s a strong bang-for-the-buck argument to be made for far less expensive missions headed in the other direction: down into the ocean depths, which remain largely unexplored and unseen by human eyes.… Seguir leyendo »