Posted on 09/15/2005 11:46:54 AM PDT by Airborne1986
There you go. But the free market won't do it. I know. I am the free market, and all I care about is making the most money for myself, everything else be damned. If it doesn't show up on the quarterly bottom line, I'm not interested.
would not the money be better spent repaving New Orleans and reinstating 500,000 peoples welfare/beer/cocaine benefits...?
Stay on earth, drink beer and smoke the base...
All will be well.
Sarcasm = off.
I did some of the potassium/argon work on the "Genesis Rock" collected by the Apollo 15 landing crew, and trace element analysis on the "orange soil" discovered by Jack Schmitt on Apollo 17. I can tell you that we've learned a heckuva lot about planetary geology from those two samples. I don't think we would have gotten them without a man there to pick them up. A probe would likely have missed them, or never found them, much less returning them back here in the quantities we had to work with. Having trained people on-site paid big dividends in these two cases.
Jack Kennedy called for the country to get to the moon the FIRST time in less than ten years, right? Now it takes longer to get there the SECOND time? I don't get it.
"It'll never happen. The expanding welfare state will claim it."
I liked your link. No Social Security reform and continued government expansion. I did an economics paper a few years back on the 50-70K/year taxpayers. I used an average of growth in state taxes, property taxes, federal taxes and the burden of Social Security. I hope the kids today are ready to fork over 117% of their incomes to pay for government.
"Shades of Heinlein."
In "The Man Who sold the Moon", DD Harriman raised the money for his lunar expedition privately. If memory serves me right he even had to pay the government for the rocket research already done.
That's an anti-science attitude, IMHO. We almost never know the value of knowledge until well after it has been learned. Franklin never imagined the true value of electricity.
But really, why do we care what mars dirt is composed of if we are not planning to go build something out of it someday?
First, we don't know what the value might be until we go and look, and second, it's hard for me to believe that you can't imagine any ways in which resources might be valuable without people going to live near them.
However, if indeed the purpose of space exploration is to find more places for large populations to live and work--something that won't happen in the near or even intermediate term--then I still assert that probes are the way to go. Exploration comes before anything else, regardless of what you want to do out there, and probes can do more of that, more quickly, and more cheaply than humans can. At the very least, it tells you where to send your human explorers first.
I'm sure of that. But what you're leaving out of the balance is how much...well, "geology" is a misnomer...planetary science could otherwise have been done with the same resources? Consider, for example, what it would have cost (in money, time, effort, and potentially human life) for human explorers to equal what Spirit and Opportunity have done on Mars?
More importantly, the probes we design are getting more and more capable over time, as a direct result of our experience in building probes. Robot capabilities will approach human capabilities faster than human exploration will approach even the moon (this wasn't true in the 1960's).
Finally, the fact that machines can go places where humans never can means that even if humans someday do the brunt of exploration in our solar system, robotic probes will always be an indispensible tool.
In order to do anything of a technical nature, we have to END THE WAR ON POVERTY. Stop floating the dead wood of society on the dole. Otherwise, out nation is doomed to a growing generation of poverty.
What exactly is the exit strategy for this war on poverty?
We've been doing this song and dance since LBJ's administration.
"What exactly is the exit strategy for this war on poverty?"
Bread and circuses.
That's exactly why I strongly prefer robotic probes to the manned space program.
So rather than spending piles to find out what Pluto's air is made out of we should focus on closer objectives and how to exploit them.
Again, you have no way of knowing what will be economically valuable and what's not. Your guesses and prejudices about what's most likely to pay off aren't worth much. (I'd detail my personal opinion that the economic value of science, while enormous, is secondary to its true value to mankind, but I suspect you'd be tone deaf to it.)
Send some robots to experiment with mining the moon.
Sounds great! But how will you know where on the moon to send them?
IMO a healthy and robust program of exploration will include both a robotic and a human component. Certainly if colonization is the (eventual) goal we can't let the manned effort lag too much. I don't see any reason why we can't do both well. Sure, it will cost, but mankind has always had the drive to reach out and explore what is beyond the next hill, the horizon, and the sky. To stifle that in order to pinch a few pennies here and there is to stunt and whither an essential and inborn trait of humankind.
So, I don't buy into this either/or attitude. It is a false dilemma and thus a logical fallacy. Speaking of which, my comment was meant to contrast your earlier comment concerning the ability of robotic missions to do the same and more of what humans could. That was a very broad generalization. In this specific case, the guys got the job done where it was unlikely a remote presence could have done as well. Inappropriate generalizations are also fallacious.
Did you hear about this?
Dubya disappoints, yet again.
The plans are all there and available. However, they're also based on 1960s technology -- computers, materials, manufacturing processes, and so on. It would be horribly expensive to try to re-do all of that.
This is a hugh disappointment. Maybe we will build another space station and give it to the Russians too.
Gotta establish a permanent, manned base at the North Pole first, to give us enough experience to establish a Moon Base.
Which will then allow us to establish a base on Mars.
Which will keep up employment of academics and nerds for many decades to come.
I agree with you, but this is something that we can't argue to the "sheeple".
I'm sorry they won't get it until China is standing on the Moon or on asteroids and launching well aimed rocks down on us and then the their bleating will be heard, "Oh why, Ohh how did this happen, how is it now that the greatest nation on this Earth is now going to be destroyed in the next 15 min and the Government can't do anything about it.
If they think China isn't seeing space as the ultimate weapon’s platform and that any UN declaration is going to stop them they are so far gone there is no hope for them.
Our industry will not go there because there is no profit in it, yet, except for LEO. China on the other hand doesn’t need profit for it to make sense. China sees space as their ultimate defense plan, and we are just plain stupid if we don't see that. Nobody inspects China's rockets for weapons or asks them what their projects are for weapons platforms, why ask anyway, they'd just lie.
U.S. industry couldn't develop space based weapons on their own if they tried, some leftist freak would scream bloody murder, and again there is no profit in it.
If we cede the high ground to other nations then it's our own stupid fault when we are looking down the barrel of a gun. Imagine if Japan had developed the ICBM before us and what the world could have looked like.
The "sheeple" do not see this as defense spending and that's probably the mistake of splitting NASA off from the military long ago.
We have to do an Environmental Impact Statement on the moon first. Gotta make sure no lunar field mice get harmed when our lunar landers touch down.
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