Pondering the nature of exploration itself, Pyne chronicles the innovative Voyager mission to the outer planets — Voyager 2 was launched first, on Aug. 20, 1977; Voyager 1 followed on Sept. 5 — and casts it as a successor to the greatest explorations in the West, from Magellan to Lewis and Clark.
Just as the lure of exploration itself is not easily explained, neither is the determination to see the mystery for oneself.
Typically, these studies have focused first on the exploration mission itself and have attempted to optimize key mission metrics—such as the initial mass in low Earth orbit (IMLEO)—through the use of government-developed systems.
The new exploration model that the O&G industry must adopt needs to shorten the time required for pertinent geological knowledge to be acquired, it must lower costs of the exploration process itself, and it must allow risk reduction measures to be applied to the exploration process.
We were all playing roles with a long tradition, as Pyne, a historian and professor of life sciences at Arizona State University, points out in "Voyager," a meditation on the nature and meaning of exploration itself, disguised as a chronicle of the life and times of a space mission.
It took two more years of growing opposition, stirred up by local residents and environmental groups like AQLPA, before the Liberal government which was openly in favour of oil and gas development in the province agreed to a limited environmental study that did not include the relevance of shale gas exploration itself but only its sustainable implementation.
However, explorative activities by themselves cannot keep extraction costs low because exploration itself may become more costly, based on the accumulation of the new findings.
Instead, they are innovative tools meant to encourage exploration itself.
That includes the exploration and extraction itself, the supply chains they rely on and the extra spending by all those newly employed oilmen.
