” ‘But they want trillions of more space dollars to find that out and conclusively determine something which will make no difference whatsoever on the state of things on this planet.’
I couldn’t agree more. Best example - Space Shuttle program. Thirty years, billions of dollars and 14 dead astronauts later - nothing.”
gaffer and oh8eleven have missed the point.
The Space Shuttle’s formal title was Space Transportation System: functional equivalent of a dump truck or a bus. Or possibly a cargo ship, or an airliner. We don’t think of those as flashy or glamorous - they do their jobs in support of other things. And when they wear out or become obsolete, we junk them, typically with less fanfare than NASA, when it sent Endeavour on its nationwide piggyback tour in September 2012.
No one complains about the monies spent operating a dump truck fleet or an airline. At least, Freepers ought not - unless they find value in siding with the moralizers of the whiny Left, who struggle endlessly to spend those “spare billions” on wealth transfer programs. Like SNAP, or Pell grants, or public housing: all those amazing social innovations, every one of them fully grounded in solid science, that return so many tangible benefits.
A friend of mine who used to work on monitoring Soviet/Russian nukes said that the ISS was a make-work program for Soviet/Russian scientists, giving them something less threatening to work on. He wasn’t justifying the ISS, just saying what he thought was the thinking in our government over the years.