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Astronaut Cernan was on Lou Dobbs last night. During the interview cernan mentioned that since a 77 year old colleague had returned to space he is working on a plan for a 17 year old to fly in space. this is very interesting since I happened to send an e-mail to Boy Scout Headquarters yesterday and suggested that the million strong Boy Socut organization could hold a fund raiser where each scout would try to sell, (cookies candy whatever) to net $20 per scout. The $20 Million raised would used to buy a Soyuz seat and allow one scout to camp out at the ISS for a coupla days!

I e-mailed Lou Dobbs and am trying to network to Cernan as well. I've communicated with NSS headqtrs in DC as well. John Travolta was the keynote speaker at the kick off of the Centennial of Flight ceremonies held by the Smithsonian. He is a noted flying afficiando and I tried to e-mail to him through one of his fan sites but...

If anyone can ehlp in this matter we can get the kids off the ground. My Space University proposal is at www.nssnt.org. Any help networking would be appreicated.

Here's reality: We are at war. All thought of of a manned space program ended for this generation on WTC911. Nothing is going to happen in space development until we finish the war. Whether it is 4 or 20 or more years away, the war's end is when we can take a look around and decide to go to Mars, the moon, mine asteroids, and get out of the hellhole of earth.

I posted the following to another "Oh, dear! What a lousy space program"- article a few days ago. It apples to this one as well:

Interesting article, but the author completely misses the point about Apollo.
Apollo was not about the Moon, not about exploring the universe, and not about boldly going where no man had gone before. Apollo was about, purely and simply, beating the Soviets to the Moon!. Once that goal was reached, we stopped going there. Put another way, what happens when you win a battle? You stop fighting it.
Space enthusiasts (and I'm one of them) cannot seem to comprehend this simple fact of life. We are doing nothing of any significance in space because there is no national imperative to do so. Thus, 30 years of stop-gap programs, the entitlement Shuttle, and make-work ISS.
Want to conquer the Solar System? Find something out there that'll make millions for somebody. Then, get financing and go do it. Quit thinking of Apollo as a template for the future -- it wasn't a plan to explore space; it was a battle in the Cold War (and one that we won, thank God!).
And stop moaning about our "lousy space future." The only ones responsible for that are ourselves.

BTW, Happy Anniversary, Apollo 17.

Shut down Houston, send the space shuttles to the Smithsonian, let the russians play with the international space station, let them call it Mir II.

Give the entire NASA budget to JPL, and let them send more probes to Jupiter's moons and Saturns moon Titan.

What is more productive, experiments looking for new ways for people to pee in zero gravity on the space shuttle, or sending probes to Europa, which offers the best chance at finding life in the solar system?