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Letter to Bill Clinton - 1996
Monday, December 31, 2007
Current mood: amused
I was looking on some CDRs for an old file from 1993 and found this.
From: Elaine Walker-Mullen (12/6/96)
To: President Bill Clinton
Subject: Put Humans Back in the Space Race
Dear Mr. President,
I am a 28 year old who works at Berklee College of Music in Boston. I am writing to you in regards to the National Space Policy. While I believe it is a useful overview, I am concerned with its lack of vision.
The new policy no longer includes the Bush administration's goal of expanding "human presence and activity beyond Earth orbit into the solar system." Your advisors have fallen short in building bridges to the future by removing this fundamental goal.
I urge you to send the public a message that we are sending probes to Mars in order to prepare for future human missions, not just to find fossils. Human paleontologists on Mars could use intuition, perception, and mobility to find signs of life. While the Viking mission was a success in many people's eyes, it was also seen as a failure since the landers were expected to find life, and didn't.
As a species, our central, motivating goal should be to spread our life to new places in the solar system to ensure that we never become extinct. If our youth knew in their hearts that they have a U.S. space program with the central goal of human space-migration, it would inspire them to make achievements in science and engineering. That is a sound investment in intellectual capital, the true source of future wealth.
Please put vision back into our National Space Policy. Put humans on equal footing with science and have the Space Summit's outcome support humans to Mars and a stable NASA budget to help get them there.
Thank you.
Truly,
Elaine Walker-Mullen
emullen@berklee.com
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