Far Left Group Opposes a Return to the Moon

"Mark R. Whittington" wrote in message thlink.net...
For your outrage:

http://www.tompaine.com/images/dynamic/427.pdf

Are these the same left wing groups who oppose

- vouchers because they give too much power to parents?
- selective education as its unfair on dumb kids?

I suppose they also think that we shouldn't have access to clean
energy in 50 years time - oh - that's not their problem.

"Matti Anttila" wrote in message
...
Hop David wrote:
Well, I think a return to the moon may be a waste of money.

That will *cost a lot*, but mostly the money will be only recycled,
not *wasted*. Nobody's going to take a LM-sized bunch of 100 $ bills and
leave them to the Moon, but instead the money is used to hire workers
to develop the project. Then it's been spread out via salary money,
which is divided to taxes and consumables by the workers.
When money runs, it is not wasted.

Right. I'm going to go downtown and break as many windows in as many
government windows as I can.

You see, it won't be a waste. They'll have to replace them which means
they'll spend money. That's a good thing right?




Matti Anttila
--
http://antti.la/

"Christopher" wrote in message
...

Do you really want to see the Micro$oft flag on the Moon?

Why not?

Hop David wrote in message ...
Mark R. Whittington wrote:
For your outrage:

http://www.tompaine.com/images/dynamic/427.pdf


Well, I think a return to the moon may be a waste of money.

If it's another Flags and Footprints exercise, it won't be a
sustainable return to space.

Better to encourage the private sector. Maybe the free market
can do the same thing for space flight that it did for airplanes
and computers.


Nothing will happen unless there is profit to be made - and
it is not clear how profit can result from traveling to the
Moon. If it were, it should have happened by now.

There were profit-seeking fur traders in the American West
even before Lewis and Clark. A second, entirely privately-funded
expedition swiftly headed to the Pacific Northwest soon after
Lewis and Clark returned. These fellows found a shorter route
across the continent, established trading relations with
numerous, previously unknown, tribes, built trading sites, etc.
They were way out in front of the U.S. Government.

(They probably would have succeeded had it not been for some
sneaky Canaidans in their midst who sold the company's
Colombia River interests to a competing Canadian trading
company when they learned about the War of 1812.)

It has been nearly 35 years since the U.S. Government put
people on the Moon. The only reason I can imagine that no
commercial interests have followed - not even by the less
expensive robotic route - is because there is no money to
be made on what is, after all, a radiation-blasted wasteland
of dust and rocks in endless vacuum.

- Ed Kyle

Well, I think a return to the moon may be a waste of money.

If it's another Flags and Footprints exercise, it won't be a
sustainable return to space.


Well why not? Each Shuttle mission is basically a flags and footprints mission,
yet we sustained it for 22 years. Each Shuttle mission is in my opinion a waste
of money, yet they keep on launching them. Its easy to imagine Moon missions
being sustained over 22 years, and I think that would be more interesting than
ongoing shuttle missions.

Better to encourage the private sector. Maybe the free market
can do the same thing for space flight that it did for airplanes
and computers.


So you want to have a Moon Prize? That should be easy to arrange. Just place a
couple billion dollars on the surface of the Moon and watch the private
companies scramble to go get it. NASA could easily build a Moon probe that
could deliver it there.

I don't know if I'm liberal or conservative. But I regard the
above as one of my conservative opinions. Discourage big government
and encourage good, healthy capitalism.

The liberals are the ones that look for excuses not to go. Those excuses could
be:

Why don't we educate our children?

Or

Oh gee, isn't it a nice day?

Or

Isn't this terrible, Big government spending? Its going to raise your taxes
more than we want to raise your taxes for social spending.

Tom

That will *cost a lot*, but mostly the money will be only recycled,
not *wasted*. Nobody's going to take a LM-sized bunch of 100 $ bills and
leave them to the Moon, but instead the money is used to hire workers
to develop the project. Then it's been spread out via salary money,
which is divided to taxes and consumables by the workers.
When money runs, it is not wasted.


Matti Anttila

Why not? If you leave enough money on the Moon, investors will raise enough
money to launch a mission to go fetch it, so long as they believe than the
money retrieved will be greater than the money spent and it gives them
sufficient return on their investements.

If they do not make the investment, the money remains on the Moon, but the only
cost to the government is delivering it there. The money itself costs little to
produce, and it does not contribute to inflation so long as it remains on the
Moon. The Fed can loan that money to the government at 0% interest for as long
as the money remains out of reach, and then charge something once its
retreived. So the government only loses money if results are achieved,
otherwise its just the cost of delivery to the Moon.

Tom
Tom

Matti Anttila wrote:
Hop David wrote:
Well, I think a return to the moon may be a waste of money.

That will *cost a lot*, but mostly the money will be only recycled,
not *wasted*. Nobody's going to take a LM-sized bunch of 100 $ bills and
leave them to the Moon, but instead the money is used to hire workers
to develop the project. Then it's been spread out via salary money,
which is divided to taxes and consumables by the workers.
When money runs, it is not wasted.


But the same applies to basicly *ANY* use you put the money. So one
might aswell choose one from which there are some slightly more real
results than footprints and flags on moon. And again, unsuprisingly
enough, that is very easy to do.


Matti Anttila

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

In case you didn't notice, you are repeating a particularly stupid bit
of economic illiteracy. Currency is a placeholder that represents
wealth. Real wealth are the things that you can obtain by exchange
with the currency, such as labor, capital, raw materials, and goods
embodying those. Space programs most certainly do consume this
real wealth (proponents will argue that they create more wealth than
is consumed, but this is not relevant to your argument.)

Paul

Alternately putting money on the Moon doesn't consume that much real wealth, it
can be delivered in a small package if large enough dem=nominations are used.
You hire the people to print the money and the people to build and launch the
small lander. We have rockets right now that can deliver packages to the Moon.
Let the private companies develop their own launch vehicles to retrieve it.
Alternately the US government could simply put up a reward for the return of
each lunar rover used in the Apollo missions, they are still there sitting on
the Moon's surface.

Tom

1) If somebody _did_ take a pile of hundred-dollar bills, and allow
the government to count them first, and then launch them into the Sun
to burn up (to use Dr. Zubrin's example), the only thing that would be
wasted is paper.

The only problem is that if its sent to the Sun, it cannot be retrieved and
spent. How about sending it to the Moon? Lets start out conservative and put 1
billion dollars on the Moon, wait a year and see what happens. It nothing
happens put another billion dollars on the Moon. It probably costs as much to
launch as the money that is being sent. We just pile more and more money on the
Moon and eventually some one will send out a mission to retrieve it, or they
can wait to see if NASA puts more money on the Moon so there will be more money
to collect, but there is a risk in doing so as someone else may launch a
mission to retrieve the money instead of you.

Tom

Problem is, in 30+ years since the last landing, no business has yet
to go back on the moon any time soon. I'd say most venture capital
firms shudder when business plans involving the moon, because NASA had
to pour billions on it in the '60s, so they figure that it would be
the same kind of money pit.


Yes, that's right. The Moon has plenty of pits to throw money into, but don't
you think if there was enough money in some of those pits, someone would want
to scoop it up and bring it back to Earth?

Tom