(Please excuse a little personal rant)

Science is big in my household – my husband and I are both scientists at heart.  He still teaches science and I used to before moving into Instructional Tech. We are fascinated by all science; Earth, Space, Bio, Chemistry, Physics it does not really matter.  My daughter’s dream since she was 5 has been to go into space and hopefully Mars with NASA. So when NASA scrolls by my twitter or plurk feed I tend to pay attention.

A few tweets about NASA’s new mission led to a Google search for further information and brought up these articles from the Washington Examiner, LA Times, Fox and a blog post by G. Shupe, where I left a comment.

Take a look please before reading on.

Taking the above into account and with recent budget cuts and project cancellations, we are wondering where is NASA headed?  I know times are tough so we expected a hold on projects till money was better but …

What does it mean we can’t go into low earth orbit on our own? Do we not have the skill and technology as a nation any more? Where is ‘space’ in the mission?

What inspired my interest in science was our exploits in space, men on the moon, skylab, and the international space station. I am a child of the space race.  A dream, a vision, a little competition is healthy in my opinion to motivate and strive for excellence.

What has inspired my daughter to study science (physics) and engineering is the dream to go to Mars.  She knows she might not actually get there but to be part of making the dream come true is inspirational.  If one of the missions is to inspire students to study math and science maybe having a vision of an active future in space might be the key. Now she wonders what will become of her dreams, can she fulfill them here or will she need to pursue them elsewhere?

As a parent I am not sure what to tell her.