http://news.ca.msn.com/top-stories/c...entid=22025989

Isn't this the reason people can no longer take "Space Exploration"
seriously any more?

Can the naysayers be gifted any better argument against spending
resources on Human
Spaceflight than having this street juggler cavorting about a 30+
billion dollar space outpost
trying to legitimize his being there by spewing propaganda from the
likes of Gore /U2 and
pretending he is on some kind of global awareness-expanding
educational crusade about drinking
water quality?

What hope is there for the human race if one of the more pressing
life and death issues demanding
attention has to be made part of some obscene side show in space to
gain a place on the
global "to-do" Agenda ? The whole thing trivializes the water quality
problem surely as much as
it does human spaceflight.

Doesn't say much for the average intelligence of the "First World"
dwellers that cannot
be bothered to come up for air long enough for a few nano-seconds'
worth consideration
of a global concern unless they are somehow "entertained" while being
so educated.

At least this guy could just present himself as the thrill seeking
mega-millionaire he really
is, it wouldn't raise the queasiness levels in so many stomachs and
he might actually turn
out to be more honestly endearing to many more people.

I grew up with Grissom, Gagarin, Lovell, Armstrong, and those others
like them that
were part of something real and (we all here believe) purposeful and
important.
Yet today, here is what our kids have to inspire them...a sham of a
space program,
unsupportable by any politician worried about his own re-election, let
alone any nation,
including one as great as the United States of America, now having
spread itself so thinly
with many pressing domestic and global obligations crying for its
attention.

This image is the perfect symbol of what a rudderless pursuit human
spaceflight has become
and why it will only go on losing credibility. And, I think America
now has just the right
demagogue in the White House fanning the Crisis-all-around-us,
America-on-the-Decline
Gloominess to deal the final blow to human spaceflight.

With an bloated and unimaginative NASA tie-wrapped around the grand
"Circus Masters of
Space" themselves, the Russians, and a hostile administration fiscally
garrotting taxpayers
to pay for grandiose social engineering projects, who here really
believes we are ever going
back to the Moon or Mars with manned vehicles within our lifetimes?

I hope I am wrong.