Canadian Clown in Space

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.

On Fri, 2 Oct 2009 07:34:08 -0700 (PDT), CarmineRed
wrote:

snip

I hope I am wrong.

Well, you are, dipstick.