We choose to go to the Moon?

And you claim *Bush* is the idiot? Your credibility is just a tad
stretched here.

Brian

No Bush is going to be a one termer. He has now mired us in another vietnam
mess. The arabs of been fighting for centuries. What made him think we could
clean it up?

Saddam was a terrible leader. But we need to keep our nose in our own business,
or at minimum have good intelligence. Obviously he had no weapons of mass
destruction, and after his sons died we knew he had no terrorist capabilty
here.

Bush junior just wanted to fix his dads mistake and now we have deaths there
nearly every day.

If bush doesnt get it together he should step aside and not run, give another
republican a chance.

Sad I voted for him he is a war monger

(Hallerb) wrote:
Obviously he had no weapons of mass destruction,

It's a wonder that you know what thousands of informed people didn't.

D.
--
The STS-107 Columbia Loss FAQ can be found
at the following URLs:

Text-Only Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq.html

Enhanced HTML Version:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html

Corrections, comments, and additions should be
e-mailed to , as well as posted to
sci.space.history and sci.space.shuttle for
discussion.

"Hallerb" wrote:

And you claim *Bush* is the idiot? Your credibility is just a tad
stretched here.

Brian

No Bush is going to be a one termer. He has now mired us in another
vietnam
mess. The arabs of been fighting for centuries. What made him think we
could
clean it up?

First no one knows what the future holds so you are just speculating about
the length of service of our current President.

President Bush is not trying to "clean it up." He is trying to establish an
Arab republic surrounded by theocracies, kingdoms, and a significant amount
of anarchy. The democratic process in Iraq, if it succeeds, will
destabilize several "governments" and could destroy the fabric that has held
millions of people in poverty just so a few priveledged people, their
families, and cronies, could live in high style. If that is what it takes
to knock terrorism on its ass, great. Doing nothing certainly did not work
well as we can tell from 911. Appeasement in today's world will work no
better than it did in 1939. The difference is that terrorists can do much
more damage with the weapons of today than they could in the 1940s. Don't
fall into the liberal media trap that the sky is falling. The only sky that
is falling is that above what remains of Saddam's loyalists. We are now
playing hardball, and the U.S. has the biggest damn hardballs on the planet.

Saddam was a terrible leader. But we need to keep our nose in our own
business,
or at minimum have good intelligence. Obviously he had no weapons of mass
destruction, and after his sons died we knew he had no terrorist capabilty
here.

Obviously? I believe they found ricin at a terrorist training camp in Iraq.
The media has played that down. If I take a gallon of ricin which is
extracted from the common castor bean, I could do much to disrupt the U.S.
economy. Have you ever seen someone die of ricin poisoning? Do you know
what it does to their tissues? Oh and by the way it is quite a painful and
irreversible way to go.

Bush junior just wanted to fix his dads mistake and now we have deaths
there
nearly every day.

I for one will be forever thankful for all of the men and women serving in
Iraq. It bothers me greatly every time I hear about one of our troops
dying. They are our best hope to avoid having the terrorists among us and
it does no good to politicize a war that was thrust upon us on 911.

If bush doesnt get it together he should step aside and not run, give
another
republican a chance.

If the economy continues to rebound and things improve in Iraq then what?
Crown him King?

Sad I voted for him he is a war monger

Oh, Gore would have been great, right?

--

Daniel
http://www.challengerdisaster.info
Mount Charleston, not Charleston, SC

Brian Gaff wrote:

because????



He tried to be like Reagan with the Trickle-Down Economics.
Then he tried to be like his father with the Iraq war.
Now he's trying to be like Kennedy.

On Sun, 07 Dec 2003 01:17:41 GMT, Kenneth- wrote:

He tried to be like Reagan with the Trickle-Down Economics.
Then he tried to be like his father with the Iraq war.
Now he's trying to be like Kennedy.

Er, I don't see a single negatifve in any of those comparisons...

Brian

Kenneth- wrote in message et...
Brian Gaff wrote:

because????



He tried to be like Reagan with the Trickle-Down Economics.
Then he tried to be like his father with the Iraq war.
Now he's trying to be like Kennedy.

For anybody who has dreamed of people one day colonizing space,
I don't see how pushing for a return to the moon can be a bad
thing.

-McDaniel

"Hobbs aka McDaniel" wrote in message

For anybody who has dreamed of people one day colonizing space,
I don't see how pushing for a return to the moon can be a bad
thing.

-McDaniel

Space.com has an article posted this morning called "Top 10 Reasons to Go
Back to the Moon":

http://www.space.com/news/moon_top10_031208-1.html

I'm not saying I agree with any or all of them -- they do include the
expected arguments. Some of the reasons seem agreeable at first glance. In
any case, I suspect if you ask 10 people what ought to be next up for us in
space, you'll get ten different answers.

Jon

"Jon Berndt" wrote ...
Space.com has an article posted this morning called "Top 10 Reasons to Go
Back to the Moon":

http://www.space.com/news/moon_top10_031208-1.html

I'm not saying I agree with any or all of them -- they do include the
expected arguments. Some of the reasons seem agreeable at first glance.

My personal opinions.

Reason 1 - A good reason to spend one's own money, not so good to
spend someoneelse's money (unless most of them are also convinced).

Reason 2 - Contrasts oddly with the 'Second space race!' pundits.
A few terrestrial policy changes might do rather better.

Reason 3 - Doesn't shout 'Moon' to me. /After/ LEO space tourism
has been successful on other than a 'hitchhiking' basis ...

Reason 4 - Highly reasonable - if it can be done at a more reasonable
cost. Say two or three Hubble Space Telescope's worth.

Reason 5 - Not convinced that that this would be much better than
can be achieved without direct visits.

Reason 6 - Free flying astronomical satellites have the (presumed)
advantage of very large & lightweight structures being possible.
I don't know how the +'s and -'s would work out.

Reason 7 - Seems dubious even compared to LEO SPS.

Reason 8 - Pretty darn long term.

Reason 9 - Spend a lot of money on anything technically difficult
and you are likely to get some spin-offs. Is the Moon more
deserving than, say an Extra-Super-Collider or developing fusion
plants?

Reason 10 - "We do these things not because they are easy, but
because we want to show that we (still) can."

Actually that last reason isn't so unreasonable. One "Reason to
go [manned] to the Moon." would be to aid in establishing and
later to test equipment aimed at supporting long term habitation
on the Moon.

I would do as much as possible, particularly at early stages,
with robotic / waldo systems but if you could get a lunar base
that is even just (say) 85% self supporting that opens up more
possibilities than if everything has to be supplied from Earth.

Stuff that would be started _now_ would be small-ish
technology demonstrators and such - rather than the big buck
manned mission preparation.

In article , Paul Blay wrote:

Reason 1 - A good reason to spend one's own money, not so good to
spend someoneelse's money (unless most of them are also convinced).

It is the biggest reason driving most proponents, I suspect. We just
want to go g

(Footnote - it's odd seeing Rees described as "a leading astrophysicist"
- he almost always gets noted as the Astronomer Royal over here]

Reason 2 - Contrasts oddly with the 'Second space race!' pundits.
A few terrestrial policy changes might do rather better.

It's not automatically a recipie for a good program, but it's plausible
that it could be instrumental to actually having someone fund one.

Reason 4 - Highly reasonable - if it can be done at a more reasonable
cost. Say two or three Hubble Space Telescope's worth.

What's the aggregate price of Hubble now? Must be well into the
multi-billion range...

Reason 5 - Not convinced that that this would be much better than
can be achieved without direct visits.

Neither am I; do we have a geologist in the house?

Reason 6 - Free flying astronomical satellites have the (presumed)
advantage of very large & lightweight structures being possible.
I don't know how the +'s and -'s would work out.

Yeah, but you need to construct them. OTOH, lunar-far-side gives you
wonderful shielding prospects, no?

Reason 9 - Spend a lot of money on anything technically difficult
and you are likely to get some spin-offs. Is the Moon more
deserving than, say an Extra-Super-Collider or developing fusion
plants?

Space programmes do have the benefit of being more diffuse, mind you -
there's more fields with odd things being developed than from, say, your
SSC.

Reason 10 - "We do these things not because they are easy, but
because we want to show that we (still) can."

Actually that last reason isn't so unreasonable. One "Reason to
go [manned] to the Moon." would be to aid in establishing and
later to test equipment aimed at supporting long term habitation
on the Moon.

This doesn't seem quite right, though; it's a cop out. "Do it now, so
that we'll be able to do it properly if we ever find a good reason to do
it".

There's certainly an argument in this field for more attention to the
moon - better mapping, an attempt to figure out ore concentrations, that
sort of thing - but I think it's a fairly flawed argument for manned
return.

--
-Andrew Gray

This rationalization process for justifying manned exploration into deep
space has been around a long time, at least since the early 1950s when von
Braun, Willy Ley and others were popularizing manned spaceflight in their
books and magazine articles. All of the 10 items on the list from Space.com
were used to justify Apollo in the 1960s. Of course, the primary
justifications for Apollo were military (Cold War politics linked to Sputnik
I (4Oct1957) and Gagarin's flight (12April 1961) and political (John
Kennedy's screwup at the Bay of Pigs 17April1961). All of the other
justifications on that list were later rationalizations used to keep the
Apollo program going after 1965 when the Vietnam War began to eat into
NASA's budget and after the Apollo 204 (aka Apollo 1) fire of 27January 1986
that killed three astronauts..

In a 1991 article in Issues in Science and Technology entitled "Why send
humans to Mars?, the late Carl Sagan noted that this type of effort to
justify manned Moon/Mars projects by generating a shopping list of
rationalizations is an exercise in futility. Sagan, usually associated with
robotic science missions to the planets, was not opposed to these manned
missions provided a sufficiently cogent and persuasive argument could be
made for them. He wrote:

"When I run through such a list and try to add up the pros and cons, bearing
in mind the other urgent demands on the federal budget, to me it all comes
down to this question: Can the sum of a large number of individually
inadequate justifications and some powerful but intangible justifications
add up to an adequate justification?"

Sagan doubted that any single justification was worth the $572B (todays
bucks) that NASA's 90-Day Study ( issued 20Nov1989) estimated for G.H.W.
Bush's Space Exploration Initiative (SEI). But he acknowledged the
difficulty in attaching dollar values to individual justifications, hoping
by summation to arrive at an adequate justification for the SEI.

Sagan's hope was that international cooperation and cost sharing would make
a manned Mars effort a reality in the early decades of the 21st century.
Maybe ISS is the first step in this type of cooperation, but that program is
in such a mess that it's too early to tell.

Later
Ray Schmitt








"Jon Berndt" wrote in message
...
"Hobbs aka McDaniel" wrote in message

For anybody who has dreamed of people one day colonizing space,
I don't see how pushing for a return to the moon can be a bad
thing.

-McDaniel

Space.com has an article posted this morning called "Top 10 Reasons to Go
Back to the Moon":

http://www.space.com/news/moon_top10_031208-1.html

I'm not saying I agree with any or all of them -- they do include the
expected arguments. Some of the reasons seem agreeable at first glance.
In
any case, I suspect if you ask 10 people what ought to be next up for us
in
space, you'll get ten different answers.

Jon