A manned mission to Mars, called for by the first President Bush in a moment of passing giddiness, was quietly dropped when someone worked out that it would cost $450 billion and probably result in the deaths of all the crew . . .Love the snark, especially when directed at the Bushies. But I was a little saddened, nonetheless. And then I read:
Based on what we know now and can reasonably imagine, there is absolutely no prospect that any human being will ever visit the edge of our own solar system -- ever. It is just too far.That shit makes me want to cry. As I do nearly every time that I look up at the full moon, and think about when I was 8-going-on-9, and people were first landing on the moon, and I thought, Sure! I'll have a job up there someday!
Sometimes, you just gotta keep the faith. My faith is: we either learn how to get there, or we die.
3 comments:
I can't help but squirm every time I read the phrase "manned mission ..." to anywhere. Surely the language has matured enough such that no one should assume "man" is a collective term for "humans."
One of the awful footnotes about the U.S. space program is that despite equally qualified women in the early program, and despite the severe concerns about weight, the P.R. folks chose heavier men to walk first on the moon.
Clare is completely right about "manned mission" and all I can say is that I'm glad I was quoting someone else when it appeared in my post.
I've gotten pretty good about using "police officer," "fire fighter," and "letter carrier" in my everyday speech and writing, but I gotta admit, I still say "manned" a lot.
"Staffed" works okay when you might have said, "the control room was 'manned,'" but in the adjective case . . . I'm stumped.
Clare, your mission is to come up with a euphonious substitute for "manned." Mission or otherwise.
And of course, the lighter the astronaut, the better the economics of the launch. Now, if we could just do something about all of the luggage that women like to bring . . .
I agree that some non-gender neutral language does not fall trippingly from the tongue. But I submit to you that if we use it for one generation, our children won't blink twice at: ?crewed mission? and "crewless mission," or "staffed mission" and "unstaffed mission." Perhaps even "piloted flight," "human spaceflight," or "inhabited spacecraft" would work, too.
Note that NASA is drifting away from the adjective "manned" and using the word "crewed" as in: "Monitoring the atmospheric composition of a crewed spacecraft cabin is central to successfully expanding the breadth and depth of first-hand human knowledge and understanding of space."
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