Freeman Dyson tillhör de klassiska kritikerna av vår tids bemannade rymdfärder i allmänhet och rymdskytteln i synnerhet. Det är helt enkelt onödigt att skicka människor ut i rymden om man vill bedriva vetenskap, det är mer en fråga om nationell prestige och liknande. Däremot tänker han djärvt om framtida kolonisering av rymden. Några Dysonlänkar:
Alternate view”: ”the Shuttle is a prime example of the ’Problem of Premature Choice’, a prevalent failing of government which he characterized as ’betting all your money on one horse before you have found whether she is lame’. When a project is sufficiently large that the ’waste’ of exploring more than one engineering alternative becomes embarrassing to public officials, they find the urge to immediately select one alternative and to kill all the others almost irresistible.”
Intervju i Wired: ”That’s the future of human exploration in space. We’ve got to wait for the biotechnology. Anything you do with conventional spacecraft and space suits – all this living in tin cans – is uninteresting and far too expensive.”
Gravity is cool: ”The first jump was from the ocean onto the land. The second jump will be from the land into space. The revolution will only be complete when life has escaped from this planet and made the universe its home. We are beginning the second ’ump now with our exploring of the planets and our quick trips to the moon. But for a long time, so long as we depend on spacecraft and spacesults to stay alive in space, we shall be amphibians. We can survive in space for a limited time, and we must return to our home planet to breathe air under an open sky. This amphibian phase may last for a few hundreds of years, while the life that we carry with us away from earth is still confined to artificial habitats. /…/ Today the rockets that we use to get from earth into space are absurdly expensive. The public believes that space-travel will always be too expensive for ordinary people. But this need not always be so. Space-travel need not always be a spectator sport, with a small elite of stars paid for by the millions who stay on the ground and watch the show on television. To make space-travel cheap in the future, we need public highways into space.”