I sympathize with my former colleagues in Houston who are spending ten years, perhaps forever, awaiting their flights into space. But this alone cann… - Brian O'Leary

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I sympathize with my former colleagues in Houston who are spending ten years, perhaps forever, awaiting their flights into space. But this alone cannot justify the shuttle.<p>On the positive side, I believe that an unmanned space program emphasizing applications satellites and the exploration of the planets would be both economical and fundamental in our quest for knowledge. Such a program could be funded annually for between one and two billion dollars and thus free money and resources for more urgent priorities. Cooperating with the Soviet Union may reduce the costs further.

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About Brian O'Leary

Brian Todd O'Leary (January 27, 1940 – July 29, 2011) was an American scientist, author, political activist, alternative energy advocate, and NASA astronaut. He was part of NASA Astronaut Group 6, a group of scientist-astronauts chosen with the intention of training for the Apollo Applications Program.

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Alternative Names: Brian Todd O'Leary Brian T. O'Leary

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Additional quotes by Brian O'Leary

In some respects our position is similar to that of the late eighteenth-century pioneers in electricity and magnetism, and also to that of early 20th-century relativists and quantum physicists who had to reconcile the otherworldly properties of the very large and the very small with the nature of ordinary, human-scale reality. But I believe that the New Science of today must take even a more fundamental “quantum” leap. As the experiments of Robert Jahn and others conclusively show, we are dealing with the direct interaction of the human mind not only with subatomic particles but with the gross, material world. This demands the development of new paradigms in physics, biology, and medicine, to say nothing of new models of consciousness itself.

Two years ago, I resigned from the scientist‐astronaut program primarily because of NASA's indifference to science in its manned space efforts. Since then an impressive array of scientists associated with the Apollo program have also resigned for similar reasons. They include the chief scientist, the director of the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, the principal investigator of Apollo lunar surface geology, the curator of the lunar samples, and another scientist-astronaut.<p>It seems utterly incredible that so many well-respected scientists could resign at a time one would suppose to be their finest hour - the return of the first rocks and detailed pictures from the lunar surface. Eugene Shoemaker, now the chairman of Caltech's Division of Geological Sciences, quit his Apollo work “out of deep concern for the direction of the nation's space goal.” He described Apollo as a “poor system for exploring the moon… The same job could have been done with unmanned systems at one-fifth the cost three or four years ago.”<p> […] In these times of conflicting, uncertain goals both inside and outside NASA, I think the unmanned planetary program provides a good example of what can be done. The Mariner 6 and 7 flyby missions gave us remarkable pictures and valuable scientific information, yet each cost less than 15 percent of the price of sending two test pilots to the moon.<p>In the future, probes will be sent to the Martian surface and to the other planets; these relatively inexpensive projects should go far in satisfying our most fundamental reason for going into space: to understand nature and ourselves better by exploring the universe.

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[…] my basis for confidence in declaring my reality checks as valid is based primarily on observing repeatable, nonlinear electric outputs in many demonstrations and in replicated experiments which I have witnessed. I could not explain the anomalous results in traditional ways. These direct observations combined with a rudimentary theoretical understanding of the physics give me reasonable confidence that the effects both measured and calculated are real. <p>Add to this fact that I am building relationships with these individuals based on growing mutual respect and trust among colleagues. I would be surprised that all of these people, for the years of work they have put into these experiments, are either deliberately or naïvely fraudulent. On the contrary, these are the explorers of a new reality, often cut off from the mainstream, because the mainstream will more often than not debunk this reality, with a denial based on the most superficial and ad hoc reasoning.

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