Herman Rubin wrote:
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.
This is why it should be done without government support
or interference.
Again easy to say, but where exactly is the money supposed to come from?
Even developing SpaceX's Falcon was a multimillion dollar project, and
it's just a launcher for small unmanned satellites.
To develop even a LEO manned space launch system is going to take
several tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars and that's quite a
speculative investment to make for something that may or not pay off in
an monetary sense until several years or decades down the road.
Many men were lost in exploration
projects of all types, with few problems, even if they
were government run. Any frontier has risks.
And payoffs for the risks....if you're lucky, like the search for the
Northwest Passage that never panned out.
But voyages for the sake of pure exploration that received major
government funding weren't all that numerous, and were sometimes done
for reasons of purely political prestige for the sponsoring country,
like the exploration of the poles.
Private voyages of pure exploration were pretty darn rare, and were
limited to fairly low cost operations like climbing Everest.
Behold the turtle. If he sticketh not out the neck,
he maketh no progress.
And if he walketh into the desert to see what's there he may cooketh in
the sun (unless he can do a real quick job of evolving into a tortoise).
I don't have any problem with your basic premise that exploration for
the sake of exploration is a good thing- it is- but I'm concerned when
it starts becoming a major expense item in a nation's budget. Today on
the news they were mentioning that they wanted to throw half a billion
dollars at researching the causes of autism in children, but they
haven't been able to get Congress to approve the request yet. That's
considerable less money that the cost of one Space Shuttle launch
(around 600 million to 800 million dollars depending on who you ask),
and finding out what causes autism is probably going to be more
worthwhile in the long term than checking out how salamanders mate in
zero G.
It's about using your money wisely in a way that seems to offer the most
long-term benefits for the money spent.
It has been this way for mankind
farther back than we have records.
And it was done on the cheap- sometimes floating on a log over to the
nearby uninhabited island, or walking over the land bridge into North
America. One such very early voyage of exploration was made by the
people who would become the Australian Aborigines ...at the time the
voyage was a major success- Australia was a verdant land and the
population that settled it quickly swelled and became very populous
....but then something changed its climate (whether it was a natural
climate change or caused by the new inhabitants is still being argued)
and the population went into steep decline in a land made barren.
In this case, the exploration was a major mistake- the explorers and
their descendants would almost certainly have had a better life if they
had stayed home and not headed out to sea. The Moon makes even
Australia's outback look like Eden by comparison. On the other hand, the
explorer's who landed on Hawaii and Tahiti hit the jackpot for
themselves and their descendants.
But there's a major difference here; when these explorers set off on
their voyages, they never knew what to expect at the far end Was it
going to be a paradise, or was the island's volcano blow up and wipe
everybody out? The inhabitants of Thera might not have settled there if
they knew that several thousand years down the road they were probably
going to be the inspiration for the Atlantis myth.
On the other hand, we do have pretty accurate data on our two most
likely targets for manned exploration; the Moon and Mars...and not to
put too fine of a point on it, both of these places suck as far as easy
human habitation go.
So if you're going there you need a really good reason to do it, or the
ability to do it simply for curiosity's sake on the cheap.
And presently we don't have any pressing reason to go there, and it is
going to cost a hell of amount of money.
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.
It is not necessary to have such limited ideas. And if you
had such a limited base, which mirrors for solar power, more
could be built on the spot.
Don't forget the weight of the mirror and habitat manufacturing factory-
the mirrors would be fairly easy, but habitat modules and the equipment
to outfit them would be anything but simple to manufacture in-situ.
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.
See the above.
You've got 14,658,000 square miles of lunar surface to examine. That's
going to take a _lot_ of bases.
I don't know what exactly you expect to find that's interesting- mineral
content will vary from place to place, but you're still dealing with
lifeless rock covered in dust that is composed of highly abrasive
microscopic particles that will play havoc with your spacesuit (and
lungs) after a few days of exposure to it.
Agency $ billions
--------------------------
AFDC 12
Medicaid 76
Medicare 131
Defense 281
Social Security 305 "
Medicare and Medicaid are pure welfare.
Why don't you ask a senior citizen what they think of Medicare and
Medicaid being evil welfare?
At least 1/3 of
Social Insecurity is welfare. Subsidized housing is
welfare. The school lunch program is welfare. There
are many other government projects which are welfare.
Any time there is a means test for a benefit, the benefit
is welfare. Any time money is taxed and used to give
benefits to others, that is welfare. The reason not all
of Social Insecurity is welfare is that those who paid
in more get more, up to a certain point.
The Roman Republic was brought down by bread and circuses,
and the founding fathers knew this. They also thought the
Athenian Republic was so destroyed.
Actually it was the Peloponnesian Wars, but on the other hand the
Founding Fathers didn't know quite a few things about history or the
world outside of the American and European spheres. Thomas Jefferson
thought there were Mammoths somewhere out west, and if you'd told
Benjamin Franklin that you could blow up a whole city with a chunk of
metal smaller than a orange he'd have crapped his too tightly buttoned
pants. Then you could really spook him by starting on String Theory.
You know what's really interesting? Rome is supposed to be evil, but we
chose an eagle as our national symbol, started sticking Latin mottos on
everything, and made sure that the houses of the wealthy and powerful
had lots of columns in front of them.
We praise Greek democracy, yet we seemed by our actions to have had a
real hard-on for Imperial Rome since the founding of the republic
Now, I'm not saying that any of the founding fathers were closet
fascists...but here's a statue of George Washington from 1791 leaning on
a fasces:
http://www.history.org/Foundation/jo...wash_front.jpg
.....coyly keeping that decapitating ax head hidden under his coat (or is
it a toga?), in best emperor Augustus governing style.
All welfare eligibility rules are high-rate income taxes.
The poor? Send them to the arena, that's what I say. ;-)
Naughtius Maximus