Talismanic Thinking

Wild claims are being tossed about regarding the future U.S. space program. Recipes for success are touted and e-mailed around – concepts based more on wishful thinking than on solid science and engineering. My friend Rand Simberg refers to those who would replicate anew the means we devised to go to the Moon several decades [...]

The SP-100 space nuclear reactor
Wild claims are being tossed about regarding the future U.S. space program. Recipes for success are touted and e-mailed around – concepts based more on wishful thinking than on solid science and engineering. My friend Rand Simberg refers to those who would replicate anew the means we devised to go to the Moon several decades ago, as having an “Apollo cargo cult” mentality (i.e., Pacific islanders waiting for parachutes to once again drop wondrous things in crates from planes, as they did during World War II). A counterpart to the so-called “Apollo cargo cult” also exists in the space community and they rely on their own talismanic thinking – a belief in some technique or item that allows us to go farther and longer in space, with incredible new capabilities. The talisman takes different forms for different groups, but ...