Posted on 10/29/2009 3:10:03 PM PDT by kronos77
“Makes one wonder if some bureaucrat signed a treaty with some green skinned alien to NOT develop spaceflight....”
Or Apollo found/photographed artificial items on the moon, and scared the hell out of everyone concerned, including the Russians who took sledge hammers to their moon stuff.
The moon has some really odd and unexplained characteristics - in rings like a ceramic bell when meteors hit, for one. Not to mention the deliberately miscatalogued or omitted Apollo images in NASA’s catalogue...
The list of stuff continues...
The bottom line is that the Russians won’t be leaving low Earth orbit any time soon even if they do figure out how to get a small nuclear reactor into orbit. All that means is that you need fewer solar panels on your “spacecraft”.”
Roddenberry was a TV producer and writer, so counting his opinion as worth something vis a vie the real Russian space program is ludicrous.
Back in those days Russia was poor, but now they are one of the leading oil exporters and are arguably far wealthier, and so can put a lot more resources toward new propulsion systems... their school system still churns out lots of engineers and mathematicians unlike the US.
I wouldn’t ride to the next county in anything made in Russia.
They're going to make a steam powered spaceship?
OK, let's see. The US is suppose to have a one trillion a year budget a year for the next ten years. But we all know that you have to at least double the amount that the Gubment budgets. (Remember cash for clunkers started out with one billion, but became a three billion dollar rathole.)
So we have a 20 trillion budget for the next ten years. Although I believe the 600 million figure to be inaccurate 600 million to 20 trillion would be as 1 dollar is to 33,333 dollars. If we could do it for 600 million, that would be pocket change.
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