Friday - June 15, 2007
Mission Control
My
daughter has a contraption that I call "mission control." It's a variation on a
common type of neglectomatic popular for parents to buy for children nowadays.
I can put Elle in it and she will entertain herself for quite some time. She
can really work herself into a state of high energy and excitement pulling on
toys that make varying sounds. She can really work up quite a
frenzy.
But what is she learning? That
pulling on a toy makes a looney toon sound and tells her "blue," "triangle," or
"great job." She certainly likes this, but is it a useful skill at this age to
learn that pulling a cord makes a sound totally unrelated to the act itself? Is
her "mission control" neglectomatic teaching her something about the real world,
or is it teaching her randomness, arbitrariness, and
whimsey?
I'm happy when she's smiling,
for any reason, but I like even more to observe her when she's looking intently
at something real and learning basic concepts. I think she learns more, and is
more stimulated intellectually, when I simply put her on the floor and let her
crawl around. Then she learns real cause and effect. She sees things, crawls
to them, holds them, tastes them, tries to understand what they are.
If you watch footage of the men in the
real mission control that put men on the moon, you see a seriousness that they
know what they are doing. There are lights and knobs and bells, and whistles,
each having a specific meaning and purpose. Unlike my daughter, they know why
pulling on a switch causes a certain action. They understand, all of them, the
physics behind every detail of what they are
doing.
Modern mission control doesn't
give me that impression. It seems a bit more like my daughter's mission
control.
If you watch old footage of NASA, you see serious
professionals. The focus of their effort was to achieve a tangible objective.
Modern mission control is of course like this in many respects, but I can't help
but feel that the intelligence and professionalism of the modern engineers and
controllers is influenced by an additional
motivation.
When we sent men to the
moon, the purpose was to put a man on the moon, to be an explorer, a human being
to crawl around the moon and discover in the tradition of eons of human
explorers. There was an element of politics, but that element was mostly the
political desire to be first, to beat our adversaries, the Soviets. Also, we
were learning technology to use rockets and demonstrate our power to our
enemy.
More recently, if you go to NASA
publications, documentaries, and websites, the focus is entirely different.
Almost invariably, the focus is on children. They let children name the Mars
rovers. They put school teachers (I will never understand why) in the space
shuttle. When they interview the engineers, they seem very intelligent, but
they appear to be playing, not applying science toward an important human goal.
They have failed to find a real purpose for their work. The need for the
science does not match the amount of money spent, or else private companies
would be doing some of it. NASA's begging for money hinges on two things,
getting politicians elected and getting money to politicians from companies
profiting from NASA programs. A few years ago, the space shuttle debris was
still falling to Earth and a Texas senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison, was already on
the television insisting that we must give NASA more
money.
It comes down to this. NASA is
rudderless, as an institution it is pulling on cords and getting funny sounds
that make it laugh and get all excited, but with little reason. Almost every
NASA program is justified as searching for life on other planets as though this
were in some way important and not necessary to
explain.
I won't stop putting Elle in
her mission control. It makes her happy. But it is only for play. Serious
learning of fundamentals must occur elsewhere, and will. NASA should not stop
its mission control, but stop using it for play. NASA needs to stop being
"cute" and deliver serious science and exploration to all of us.
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