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The Planetary Society BlogBy Emily LakdawallaRetiring the Shuttle Will Set Us FreeAug. 4, 2009 | 10:47 PDT | 17:47 UTC
by Bill Nye
 Bill Nye is contributing to the blog this week as Emily gets back up to speed. Nye spent several years working as an engineer until he combined his dual love of science and comedy to create his on-screen persona, "The Science Guy." Nye's mission for many years has been to turn on the public in general, and kids in particular, to the "way cool" wonders of science. From 1992 to 1998, Nye was the writer, producer and talent for the Emmy award-winning Bill Nye the Science Guy TV series. His latest TV program was Stuff Happens.As your vice president, I do my best to listen to what most of us want in space. Like any other big change, the retirement or grounding of the Space Shuttles will produce opportunities. We've got two big ones: we can make serious plans to have humans visit relatively nearby balanced-gravity Lagrange points on our way to asteroids, and we can start the long diplomatic process that will be required to get taikonauts, astronauts from the China Space Agency, onto the International Space Station (ISS). Over the last few weeks with the anniversary of the Moon landing, people in the United States and elsewhere have been wringing their hands about the planned retirement of the Space Shuttle around September of 2010. That's next year. There is great concern from some quarters that the United States, the team that scored so big in the space race, is going to retire and let others take control of the black skies. This is not a new thing. The Shuttle has been shutdown twice before– after the wrecks of Challenger and Columbia. And by the way, some U.S. astronauts are currently not so wild about getting aboard a ship that has a nearly 2% chance of not coming back. No other agency comes close to achieving what NASA achieves every day in robotic exploration of nearby and distant worlds. NASA is the undisputed, often astonishing, world leader. NASA put people on the Moon forty years ago. No one else is ready to do that. It was the Cold War. The landing helped it wind down. Remarkable discoveries were made, but that science was not the reason for the missions. We should ask ourselves, is it such a bad thing that other space organizations can provide transportation to the International Space Station? The Russian Federal Space Agency provides the rockets to get people and equipment to Space Station right now. That service has proven good and reliable. So in this other way of looking at it, the retirement of the Shuttles frees the United States to have NASA (the National Aeronautics & Space Administration) design a new rocket like the well-along Ares machine. Or, NASA could hire that job out and give private companies a shot or two. Potentially, i'sall good, as they say. So much has been written about this already, so here it is briefly. Everyone, astronauts included, wants to somehow retire the Shuttles. Everyone also wants to take humans above and beyond low Earth orbits. Almost everyone sees value in maintaining the Space Station and continuing research there. So, let's have NASA move up and on to asteroids en route to Mars, and let's engage emerging space agencies by meeting their representatives aloft. One day, we want human geologists and astrobiologists to visit Mars to look for signs of ancient or even modern life. A discovery like that would change our world. So, let's take the next steps at a rate that we can afford. It will take a decade or two to get up and not just out, but way out. So, let's chip away. Later this week, I'll write on other more scientifically interesting stuff. Thanks for reading this far, if you did.
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