An excess of nationalism

Trinidad News ^ | 10/09/2004 | Gwynne Dyer

[KevinDavis]

"This is the true frontier of transportation," said Marion Blakely, head of the US Federal Aviation Administration, when SpaceShipOne, designed, built and flown by American private citizens, flew into space for the second time in two weeks and won the US$10 million Ansari-X prize. Then Richard Branson of Virgin enterprises made a deal with Mojave Aerospace Venture, the team headed by Burt Rutan and funded by Paul Allen, billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, to develop a fleet of larger spacecraft based on Rutan's design and start commercial space flights in 2007-8.

It took us all back to the romantic early years of aviation, when thrusting entrepreneurs teamed up with iconoclastic engineers and bold pilots to create whole new technologies in a weather-beaten hangar. There we were once again, at the airstrip out in the desert, watching mavericks mould our future. It was a great achievement, redolent of the 1930s and yet relevant to the future-and then Brian Binnie had to go and ruin it.

[RightWhale]

most of the space program should be turned over to private business.

How will this be done? There is no private property in outer space.

[Nebr FAL owner]

I've seen & read some of his other works he is basicly a socialist pacifist who thinks that folks that want freedom instead of the socialist utopia are knuckle dragging oafs . If you are willing to fight for your country you are a special kind of idiot.