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SPACEFARING WEB 2.5: John Carter McKnight has a new Spacefaring Web essay up, this one asking what are the Big Questions of the day and what is the role of space exploration and settlement in answering them:

We highlight the answers we have, and advance the urgency of the right questions, by creating and supporting those projects which address them and scrapping or minimizing those that don’t. This would favor Mars over Pluto, SETI over ISS, space tourism over space solar power, terraforming and ISRU experiments over geomorphologic data gathering. This does mean provoking controversy. But bear in mind that NASA has largely chosen its mission with an eye to avoiding controversy. In this mission it has succeeded: in the popular mind there is an equivalency between NASA, space, and trivial or outdated answers to unasked questions – with the exception of those programs that resonate, as mentioned above. If we wish more support, more interest, more participation, it is precisely this safely bland marginality that we must end. By moving to the center of the controversies of the age we will draw both opposition and support, but once again space will matter.