Mark and I talked a good amount about the effects of quarantine and Covid19. People are learning how to work online, go to school online, connect with friends online, shop online, and even see the doctor online. This capability will accelerate many of the trends of virtual business displacing physical businesses.
We also did get to talk about NASA’s 2024 moon plans. Mark had heard about it, probably from news relaying the current administration’s goals and objectives. Mark supports exploration. He does not see much value in going back to the moon per se, but supports it for spinoffs of technology, bringing people together to work on a common goal, and how it would support further exploration. And if it were safe and affordable, Mark would go into space. But he would probably not go to Mars.
We talked a little bit about NASA’s current approach with the Human Lander of having companies be responsible for creating the lander and selling the service back to NASA. This is a different approach than what was done in the Apollo program, and it is a different approach than what the US House Science Committee wants to do. They would like to have the traditional approach of having the government define all the requirements, pay a government contractor to build it, and for the government to own it. We know that this approach leads to costly solutions that take longer to build and have very limited use.
Hopefully this new approach, which has had great success in the private sector, will produce great results that will allow for us to continue to use it.
We also talked about this project. Looking at the videos and doing an analysis is something I plan to do. I am thinking the videos will be especially interesting to see a few years from now. What were people thinking and talking about? What were their views of the 2024 moon landing? And to actually see what happens.