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Space Exploration in Times of Crisis
**Please not that this event is now fully booked**
Date & Time: 17:15, 7th Feb
Venue: Riley Auditorium, Clare College
The space program brought us advances in medicine, foods, textiles, computers, communications, the list goes on and on, but what has manned space travel given us? The space shuttle program failed to live up to its primary goal of providing relatively cheap and efficient human space travel. The reason: Human space travel is risky and costly. While initially Nasa had estimated the likelihood of a shuttle disaster to be minute, engineers estimated the loss rate at about 1 in 100 flights, close to the actual disaster rate. Either aboard the shuttle or the International Space Station, astronauts have demonstrated that what we learn from sending people into space is not much more than how people can survive in space. With Nasa, the ESA and other space agencies pumping money into manned space travel can we really justify the cost? Lord Martin Rees, previous Master of Trinity College, Thomas Arthur Reiter, a retired European astronaut and Iya Whiteley, Deputy Director of the Centre for Space Medicine shall attempt to answer this question.
