Herman Rubin wrote:

Can a program that's going to peak out at around three to four percent
of the entire national budget be justified by the promise that it might
fetch back several hundreds of pounds of rocks from the Moon?



We should have kept using Saturn V; it is still one of the
best launch vehicles made. And it is not the pile of rocks
brought back from the moon, but what we have learned from
them, which matters. We would have learned much more if
we had not canceled the last few Apollo trips,


What's not widely known is that NASA itself didn't have much of a
problem with the later flights getting canceled; after Apollo 13 they
realized that what they were doing inherently had a lot of risk
associated with it, and if they kept it up for enough flights they were
probably going to lose a crew sooner or later, so they thought it was
better to end up on a high note, and ditch the later flights.

and we would
have done well to start a lunar base which could provide us
with still more knowledge.


Very expensive, and barring the development of some sort of super rover
or something similar to the 2001 Moonbus, you'd be very limited in
regards to the area you could examine- say a circle just ten or twenty
miles out from the base.
That's pretty minuscule in comparison to the total area of the Lunar
surface.
The problem with the rover or rocket bus idea is that you'd have to send
two everywhere together in case one broke down, so that its crew
wouldn't be stranded beyond walking distance from the base.

Using the money instead to get
people on welfare to have larger families, in an already
overpopulated world, which is what we have been doing, is
far worse.



Welfare doesn't cost as much as most people think:
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-runawaywelfare.htm
In fact, in 1993, it was dwarfed by defense spending, which was itself
put in second place by Social Security:

"Argument

One of the most popular myths is that welfare is a serious drag on the
economy. Actually, it barely registers on the radar screen. The most
vilified form of welfare is Aid to Families with Dependent Children
(AFDC), which allegedly gives poor mothers a financial incentive to
avoid work and have babies. Yet in 1992, AFDC formed only 1 percent of
the combined federal and state budgets. Food stamps also took up 1
percent. Both programs cost $24.9 billion each, comprising 1 percent
each of the combined federal, state and local budget of $2,487 billion. (1)

Comparing the size of federal AFDC to other federal programs puts a
great deal in perspective:

Federal AFDC Expenditures as Compared to Federal Spending in Other Areas
(1993) (2)

Agency $ billions
--------------------------
AFDC 12
Medicaid 76
Medicare 131
Defense 281
Social Security 305 "





Can a former member of the Nazi rocket building program be successfully
sold to America as our new hero...despite his former involvement in a
slave labor camp and the death of thousand of slave laborers in it?



How much was he responsible for? There is no evidence that
he recruited or mistreated the workers.


Oh, boy, do you need to do some reading!
http://www.answers.com/topic/wernher-von-braun
He did indeed recruit some of the Mittlewerk workers with the aid of his
staff from Buchenwald, and admitted to it. He also visited the
Mittlewerk itself on several occasions, and said he found the conditions
there "repulsive" but never witnessed any beatings or executions-
survivors of he factory tell a different story- of von Braun walking
seemingly unconcerned through piles of corpses and examining a piece of
a V-2, and declaring hat it had been sabotaged during
construction...which led to the assembly workers who made it being taken
away and hung.

That is not the
way to get things done.



At the Mittlewerk things got done by a very simple method: You do what
your told to do or at the very least you get no food, and it then goes
up a sliding scale through beatings, and ends up with you hanging under
the portable gallows that could be wheeled from one part of the complex
to another as it was needed.

As for his ability, he fairly quickly got an American object
in orbit after Eisenhower's stupid Vanguard attempts kept
failing, using off the shelf military rockets not intended
for the purpose.



Can President Kennedy successfully move Eisenhower's military-industrial
complex into equally profitable peaceful ends?



The military-industrial complex was a figment of a stupid
general's imagination.



Jeeze, I thought he handled Operation Overlord fairly competently when
all was said and done.
He also came up with one of the really useful contributions to the whole
nation with a military-based project in the "Defense Highway System"
which is where all of our excellent interstate highways got started
(those overpasses on the highways were originally going to have fallout
shelters under them BTW) which not only made the large scale shipment of
goods via truck possible, thereby breaking the monopoly of the railways
on the movement of cargo around the United States, but also made it
possibly for Americans to vacation in far-off sections of their own
country with comparative ease and economy

These are the questions we must ask ourselves before we build Saturn V...."
Been there, saw that.



The move to "peaceful" research after the end of the Cold
War has almost destroyed basic research in the US. The
military found that basic researchers could do applied
work with the hidebound applied researchers could not do;
they had to thing "outside the box" to be theorists.
This continued during the Cold War because of the fear of
this being successful on the other side.

Meanwhile, the government support of research has destroyed
the universities' basis for their support, and it is in very
bad shape.


The problem being that if the military funds the universities research,
they are going to want something at the end of it with military
potential, like the SLAM nuclear ramjet powered cruise missile; a great
(and very expensive piece) of military-funded research, but without any
practical purpose in the civilian world due to the fact that the whole
missile would become radioactive shortly after you revved the engine up,
so that nuclear ramjet powered airliners were going to be a non-starter.
Which is all for the good, as I'd hate to see an Al-Queda terrorist run
one of those into a building at Mach 3.

Do not think, however, that I want government investment in
space. I want to allow those who believe in man's development
in space to be able to support it instead of supporting the
ill-designed welfare programs, and to do it without government
interference.


Well, such high hopes are going to require several billion dollars to
bring to fruition, so unless Bill Gates has some pocket change burning a
hole in his pants....

The same holds in education.

George Bernard Shaw wrote (from memory):

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.



I don't know if I'd call thermonuclear weapons, anthrax spore fast
breeder tanks, and binary nerve gas bombs "progress".
More like annihilation waiting for a chance to occur.
All in all, I liked the highway system better. :-D

Pat