Dave Winer on the U.S. Space Program and the Web as a News Source During Crises
Dave Winer speaks for a lot of people who believe in the "big goals" approach to space exploration:
Space travel is more important than the seven people who died and the billions of dollars that were lost. Every time we've gone to space there were benefits that we didn't know about before, that we reaped later. The computer you're using right now is a product of lots of space missions. This is where the moon mission style of development came from. I'm a big believer in it because it produces results. Declare an impossible mission and then achieve it. Then take stock. There's a pretty good chance you invented something important along the way. But you were too busy to notice.
Winer's essay also calls for an effort to document problems that people had in getting information quickly on to the web in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster. This is not so much a request for a catalog of access problems, if any occurred, but, for a discussion of issues with the efficiency of weblog publishing tools. This is a good idea.