1. You are evidently anti space program. I’m good with that..just say so. So I guess we should have never entered into the space program at all.
2. I don’t know, nor do you, what a group with mega bucks might be willing to do..just because they can. Why do you pick on one small portion of Newt’s ideas?
3. You picked one biproduct of the space program. Not the multitudes of useful products. Lewis and Clark had government funding for exploration...noone is asking for funding for further space exploration and this is a useless argument.
4. I have to work tomorrow. Good evening.
It’s morning where I am, so I will reply.
I am not “anti-space program” Thomas Sowell once said in response to a similar argument in favor of some liberal entitlement program that when he was a young man with a family, he did not purchase an expensive set of encyclopedias, even though it was a good and desirable thing, because when he only had finite resources to support his family, he had to make choices.
So the opposition to something like a permanant moon base at the moment, doesn’t mean I don’t think it is a good idea in the abstract, or that I wouldn’t like future generations to pursue it, but right now we need to get out of the fiscal hole the stateists have put us in, and we have to pass on the encyclopedias right now and revisit the issue when 1/2 of the money we are spending each month isn’t boworrowed money.
I know there are other useful spinn off’s from the space program, I picked one to illustrate the point. You don’t pay engineers to design a moon base and spend the money to build it with the goal that the trillion dollars of R&D may produce a better mouse trap. It would be more efficient to spend far less money and just focus on the mouse trap if you really need a better one. Spin off technology is a fringe benefit from the space program, but nobody, with the possible exception of you, is advocating that we should fund the space program with billions if not trillions of dollars in the hope that someone will develop turkey pot pie in a tube, or a hear resistant tile. That is a grossly inefficient way to develop these products. We only tout them because we would have spent the money anyway. Can you imagine the outrage, if someone introduced a bill containing the equivilent of the NASA budget for the purpose of developing these spin off technologies. I don’t know which is more absurd, the notion that our space program can be justified on the basis of spin off tech, or that anyond really believes Moon base Newt can be built with private funds.