"Paul F. Dietz" wrote:

:Fred J. McCall wrote:
:
: :The general populace's apathy is a rational response to the situation.
: :What, exactly, is the manned space program doing for them or their
: :descendants?
:
: It wasn't doing anything before and lots of people were excited about
: it, Paul.
:
:Ah, and because people were doing that, it couldn't be irrational.
:As we all know, people are never irrational.

Well, most people most of the time. You seem to be pretty irrational
on this particular topic.

: :The only complaint I have about the apathy is that it's allowing
: :the charade to continue.
:
: As opposed to killing human access to space (and any interest in same
: by most folks) outright?
:
:I object to massively expensive government entertainment programs
:for space fans. I reject that notion that 'getting people interested
:in space' is a worthwhile goal.

Then we really have nothing further to say to each other. I'm
interested in seeing people interested in space so that space industry
goes somewhere. You've just stated that you don't think this is a
worthwhile goal.

:A manned space program, IMO, must
:be justified by the objective good it does for the country, and
:by its cost. IMO, ESAS fails to measure up.

So you are against all manned space.

: Except that's not going to happen because you'll never get over the
: 'hump'. You're basically stuck at COMSAT sorts of applications. No
: need for people there.
:
:Well, at least you're off the 'getting people interested' thing here.

Not really, no. You just don't understand why that is a valuable
thing to be doing.

:The problem is, ESAS doesn't 'get over the hump' either.

Certainly not by itself. Nothing does, so we should all retire to our
nice boxes full of cotton batting. Everything is forever undoable.

:What it does
:is, at enormous cost and over an extended period, do nothing much
n which anything further can be built.

Well, except for a base (where lunar construction techniques can be
experimented with) and that very "extended period", itself. Get
people interested for "an extended period" and at the end of it we'll
have a lot more scientists and engineers.

: :Since ESAS won't do anything significant to advance that goal,
: :killing NASA would be no worse, and would save money.
:
: No, it would be worse because even fewer people would be interested in
: the future. The money saved would go where, do you think, Paul?
:
:Lots of people would remain interested in the future. They would
:be less interested in your particular flawed view of the future.

Yes, lots of people aren't interesting in seeing people in space. Of
course, YOU wouldn't have the toys YOU like without government space
programs that, at the time, were seen as 'pointless', either.

Hey, I know. Let's just spend it on welfare....

on't be so self centered.

Ah, can't argue the merits, can we, Paul?

:As for where the money could go... gosh, maybe the government
:could just NOT SPEND IT? If you claim that's impossible, that the
:government will continue to spend far beyond its means, then
:the country is doomed anyway, ESAS or not.

And not spending it does what? Other than kill space, I mean.

: :Avoiding the shuttle fiasco would have been a huge benefit,
:
: To who? Terminating space, remember? Contrary to what your sort
: generally think, cutting manned space does NOT lead to more money for
: non-manned space. It leads to a cut in ALL space.
:
:But in this case, remember that US expendable launcher programs
:were explicitly targeted for termination so shuttle would have
:more customers. Had shuttle not been developed, this wouldn't
:have happened. As it stands, the expendable programs were restarted,
:at considerable cost, when it became clear how disastrous the
:shuttle program would be. But by that time a decade or more
:had been wasted.

That doesn't seem to follow, Paul.

:Expenables in the US would be far ahead of where they were had
:shuttle not been built. We might have had the equivalent of
:the Atlas 5 a decade earlier, or perhaps even sooner. We might
:even have started designing the first stages of these vehicles
:for recovery and reuse.

You can't 'railroad' until it's time to 'railroad', Paul. You have to
wait for all the supporting technologies. We've been using the same
old boosters right along.

In fact, you would have been one of the folks arguing against the
change. After all, what do we need those new expendables for? The
ones we have are putting up everything there's a commercial interest
in putting up. How does investing a bunch of money in new hardware
turn a profit?

: :and US expendable launchers would be much better than they now are.
:
: I can't find a single reason to believe that.
:
:Sucks to be you, I guess.

Not really, no. However, your vision seems to be mighty selective....

--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw