Posted on 09/28/2005 9:02:35 AM PDT by anymouse
You can thanks Lyndon Baines Johnson for ensuring through his Great Society, that space exploration was doomed. But hey, we have some lovely projects in Newark, Watts and the Bronx to show for it.
If I know the government, they'll destroy that information.
Agreed totally, except it wasn't NASA. It was Congress and the White House. NASA just does what they are told.
Griifing is good, but he still answers to a political boss. Thus we'll be trading two mistakes for one big mistake.
In today's 'risk averse' environment, Apollo would have never seen the light of day(from the Moon). Also add all of the countless regulations, specifications, etc. that have been put in place since and I doubt that any hardware would be deemed fit to fly at anywhere close to the cost (in today's dollars) of the entire space program of the 60's.
Wish I had been around to work in the industry back in the 60's instead of 20 years later. Still, the stories told by those that were still thrill me :-)
Nah. Jimmy Carter was a mistake. The Shuttle and Space Station were due to design by committee that produced compromises and muddled functionality.
However, aside from communications and military benefits I have never understood the economics and have always thought it is a financial boondoggle.
I think exploring the earths oceans has more interest and more promises of results.
You're defending a white elephant. Two in fact. No useful science came from either program but we did manage to kill a lot of astronauts with a flawed design. At least NASA is finally admitting it's gross error and now it may be possible to move forward with a more rational design.
We could recoup some of our investment in the ISS if we de orbited it and sold tickets to the light show. That's about the only useful thing I can think of to do with it.
Some experiments can be done on parabolic flights using regular aircraft (the Vomit Comet). Longer duration experiments can be done on automated, unmanned spacecraft. We already have information for long duration manned spaceflight. We don't need to keep repeating it over and over again.
It's almost like we intentionally stopped trying, and waited for the rest of the world to catch up and pass us.
ping
Come to think of it, why didn't we put our space station on the moon?
It would then at least be anchored to a stable foundation.
Tang was developed prior to the space program. It wasn't selling until they got NASA to add it to the astronauts menu. Then every kid in America and most of the rest of the World wanted the crap.
He's referring to the particular orbit it is in, 51.6 degrees.
See my post #10.
How is the cost of concrete going to be affected by the run-up of the cost of natural gas and oil? Is that a significant part of the cost?
It isn't almost like, it's exactly like, and deliberate policy.
It sidetracked the space program which didn't really have anything serious for the next step after the Apollo program. It saddled it with an expensive, hard to maintain launch vehicle, with unrealistic expectations of what it could do to help pay for itself, and didn't know what to do next.
The ISS is is horrible compromise project..too small to do what the original concept was, and very expensive.
The 70s and 80s were bad for the Manned Space Program...and that lack of vision, and the lack of someone to push for it hurt a lot.
It's reached a point that a lot of us die-hard space junkies have wondered if the agency isn't too filled with lack of vision and a certain defeatism, to go to the next level...
Kill NASA! Let the private sector do the job! Award government contracts to those companies who prove they can do the job!
Asked whether the space station had been a mistake, he said: "Had the decision been mine, we would not have built the space station we're building in the orbit we're building it in."
what does he propose?
Wrong. Changing the composition of the foam to appease the greenies cost the 7 astronauts.
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