Sean O'Keefe needs to have his attitude adjusted.

Even in the wake of the Columbia shuttle disaster, NASA needs humans to do things in space that robotic missions can't do, space agency Administrator Sean O'Keefe told lawmakers Wednesday.

"We know the lesson from this terrible accident is not to turn our backs on exploration simply because it is hard or risky," O'Keefe said. "As John Shedd wrote about the age of ocean exploration, `A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.' "

Nice quote, but as long as you allow people to continue to keep the debate on the basis of exploration, the robot guys are going to win every time. You need to start talking about space development, and civilizing the wilderness.

Where do the NASA Administrators come from that they all have this same limited view point?

They come from the general population. We have a huge educational task on our hands.

How many ships these days are built for exploration?

Just a thought ...

o'Keefe should do a google search on "waggonauts" and "autonauts"

What the heck is to explore? Except for the smallest or most distant planetesimals, don't we pretty much already know where things are?

Kevin, we may know where they are, but we don't know much about what they are, nor how they came to be that way.

And when it comes to what we might be able to use them for, we know almost nothing at all.

My point was that there isn't anything ahead of us that we need the government for.

Even before Lewis and Clark, there had been Europeans wandering around in the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest. The Corps of Discovery made better maps, but once that was done the gummint got out of the way and let individuals go on about the business of finding and describing.