Risk and exploration: Earth, Sea and the Stars, NASA Administrator’s Symposium, September 26-29, 2004, Naval Postgraduate School Monterey, California

Certainly, no records exist of people living in Lisbon 500 years ago attending a candlelight symposium featuring Amerigo Vespucci or Vasco da Gama or Ferdinand Magellan. So, this is an opportunity given by modern technology and the ease of transportation to pull together this really extraordinary group of folks who’ve experienced the full extent and breadth of exploration and the risks attendant thereto. Such a gathering was important for the purpose of parsing this larger question of risk and return on the exploration ventures we are about. I am particularly grateful to John Grunsfeld, who has really provided the intellectual horsepower behind this kind of effort to think about these questions in a structured way, and to Keith Cowing, two very disparate kinds of folks, but folks who share the passion and desire for exploration and an understanding of the attendant risk to it. So, to Keith and to John, I am most grateful for that extraordinary nudge that you all provided in pulling this together and providing the structure of the meeting. We are gathered here, appropriately, in a place like Monterey, at the edge of a great ocean, to discuss exploration in all of it facets of extreme environments here on Earth and in space. Indeed, this historic location is steeped in a history of exploration. The ventures of