(Michael Shara) The Beyond Planet Earth Space
Exhibition is timely right now because humanity
is at a crossroads with respect to where we're
going to go and what we're going to do in
space.
For the first twenty five years of the space
program, we were focused on getting a man
to the moon.
The next twenty five years were largely spent
building the space shuttle, building the International
Space Station and understanding what happened
to people when they spent long periods of
time in weightlessness.
We know those answers and those programs have
now come to an end.
We really need to look forward and try to
decide collectively, as a society, all of
humanity, where we're going to go next, what
are we going to be doing next, and that's
what this exhibition looks at.
When you get to the moon, or step off on the
moon in the exhibition, you see an elevator
coming off the moon.
This is a way of leaving the moon without
rockets.
You'll also see an enormous, liquid mirror
telescope.
We could build a telescope on the moon that
would be almost a mile across.
We could observe in the infrared and the ultraviolet
parts of the spectrum, which are inaccessible
to ground-based telescopes.
We would also be doing mining on the moon,
processing rare minerals.
After leaving the moon we'll take you on a
voyage to an asteroid, perhaps the single
most reason they're interesting because they're
dangerous to us.
The question for all these asteroids is not
"Will they run into Earth?", it's really,
"When will they crash into Earth?"
We're almost at the place in terms of our
capabilities, our technological capabilities
that we're going to be able to deflect an
asteroid.
The other thing we want to be able to do is
mine asteroids.
Asteroids contain rare Earth elements that
are needed both for industrial production
on Earth, and for producing space ships to
travel between the planets and eventually
up the stars.
Going to Mars is much more difficult than
going to the moon.
It takes up to a year to get there, if you
use a least energy orbit from Earth to Mars.
We have a wonderful new Mars rover on exhibition,
the Mars Curiosity Rover, which is being launched
in November 2011 and will get to Mars in the
late summer of 2012, we do eventually want
to send humans to Mars, because a human can
accomplish, in a day, what will take a space
craft or a robot, perhaps, a year to do.
We look up at the stars and we wonder, "What
are they?"
"Why are they there?" and because we wondered,
because astronomers and others worked on those
problems, we understand today, far better
how the Universe works.
And just as we went from the Nina and the
Pinta and Santa Maria, to the Space Shuttle
in the International Space Station, we're
going to go, I'm convinced, out to the stars.
Astronomers are now developing the Road Map,
three or four or five centuries when we have
the technology to go to the stars, we'll know
which stars to go to, the ones that have the
most interesting and most Earth-like planets.
