The full interview will be featured in the Fall 2011 issue of Technophilic, but meanwhile here is an excerpt that features some of the questions we received from our readers through Facebook.
[Question submitted by Philip Mark] What's the biggest hurdle that NASA faces in space exploration? Money? Technology? Human resources?
It's clearly money. Second, I would say it's technology given that there is a potential show-stopper--galactic cosmic rays--which we don't know much about other than they could be damaging and are hard to shield.
The human aspect is also an issue for North America because we have so few students (relatively speaking) who study science and engineering. But the space program doesn't need that many engineers, so I wouldn't view that as such a big concern.
[Question submitted by Jimmy Chan] Rumors are that a higher education bubble will strike soon. Is it really? And what recommendation do you have on this matter?
I think that the economy we're going into in the world--I will talk about this [at the convocation speech]--will be a very high-tech world that will need a lot of really good scientists and engineers. But science and engineering have really become global professions today, so an engineer in Canada has to compete with an engineer in China, India, Singapore, Taiwan, etc. for a job.
There are very good engineers in those countries, and a lot of them work for a lot less money than your average American or Canadian engineer will work for. So I think the economy of countries like the United States and Canada will depend heavily on technology and it will be a very important growing field; it'll demand a lot more engineers and scientists than there are today. But we're now passing through a transitional period where engineers in North America and Europe will find it challenging to compete for jobs in that global market. I think those engineers will be able to compete if they're really good; there's always room for really good engineers and scientists. But that's also true of law school, and business school: the market is difficult.
[Question submitted by Wei-Ju Chen] Is it a good idea to be diverting scarce funding for human space adventures? Would it be more inexpensive to be using robots for space mission instead of humans?
Another great question. There are a lot of missions that can best be done by robots, and should be done by robots--and are being done by robots. There are some missions that either can't or probably shouldn't be done by robots.
The ones that can't are the ones that, for example, are done to repair unexpected failures that you hadn't anticipated when you designed the system. I'm thinking of the Hubble Space Telescope: that failure had never been anticipated by anybody and I would submit that no robot--that we know how to design today--could have fixed it, whereas humans were able to do that.
I've also been told by people who design robotic spacecraft that we learn more from having a geologist on the Moon--and I'm thinking of Jack Schmitt, the astronaut who was a trained geologist--than we learn from all the robots which we sent to the moon.
Then there's the inspirational aspect: If the objective is to put a flag on top of Mount Everest, that can be done relatively easily, but it's a little different from having Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary climb Mount Everest.Some people will say "how many dollars is inspiration worth?" I don't know how to answer that. How much is Shakespeare worth? How much is a great opera or a great symphony worth? These are things that great nations like Canada and the United States do and hopefully will continue doing. These are things that we can afford to do, for which the inspirational value should not be underestimated in any way, but there are also, of course, the technical advantages.
And I believe there's a place for each
