The Orbital Perspective

Ron Garan, 2015

Astronauts are our experiential surrogates. Meat machines in orbit are not practical as tools and actuators - while people in orbit can make flexible responses to emerging problems and opportunities, so could robots if we spent the same money developing them, and the predictive-adaptive telepresence software and procedures necessary to use them effectively. In environments where human beings simply cannot survive and be useful, like the bottom of the ocean, we deploy machines and accomplish great things with them. Vacuum and microgravity are much friendlier to both machines and people.

Governments have chosen to filter the space experience through the humans they select to launch, in the bounded environment of the International Space Station. In this way, they control what is seen in space and who sees it, and the stories that are told about space. The "orbital perspective" is the "government employee perspective", and it is no accident that NASA has never launched a human being that was not g