Posted on 03/11/2009 5:50:15 PM PDT by KevinDavis
HAMPTON, Va., March 11 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA is working on the building blocks to return humans to the Moon by 2020, then send them onto Mars.
It's part of the national Vision for Space Exploration established five years ago. Just what is America's plan and is it the right one? Four international experts will address those questions and others in a special Moon-Mars Forum, March 17, from 7-9 p.m. at the Virginia Air & Space Center in downtown Hampton.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.prnewswire.com ...
I would like to see the US go to Alpha Centauri first and plant a flag there..
:’) I heard there’s a revolt on Alpha C.
We should go to the moon, and give every African-American demanding reparations 40 acres there, oh, and a space mule.
You know, it’s a funny thing. The GOP spends money on defending our borders and securing our liberties, and the left goes crazy. The dems spend money on redecorating the local homeless shelter in fall colors, and the right goes crazy. But where do both sides of the aisle get the warm and fuzzies? Dumping money into outer space.
The simple facts of the matter are that space exploration has not paid for itself, and that all the arguments made about how awesome space is (by NASA, but also by free-market space wonks) are specious if you take away the HUGE COOLNESS FACTOR of outer space.
Free example: NASA likes to gloat about the spin-off technologies from space exploration, like miniaturized rocket systems, improved materials tech, improved electronics. A lot of this is simply advertising hyperbole (News Flash: the Apollo program did not invent the integrated circuit). But even still, if you take away the HUGE COOLNESS FACTOR, it works out like this: well, we spent $150 billion in today’s money. And we did bring back a couple of rocks, valued at several million dollars. So the remaining $149.9 billion, that was what we spent on R&D for miniaturizing rocket systems.
Sorry?
The same goes for today’s starry-eyed plans. We are going to invent and build a spaceship and fly it to the moons of Jupiter in order to pick up cheap hydrocarbon fuels. Is anyone actually drawing up a business plan for this? No, because of the HUGE COOLNESS FACTOR. Jupiter, man.
There is almost no money to be made in space, and the money that is out there is not in the cool stuff, but in the boring, unmanned, earth-orbiting sattelite end of the spectrum. If entrepreneurs want to go broke trying to put a golf course on Uranus, that’s their god-given right. But the US government should be out of that business.
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