Well to be fair, while many people say "Obama killed the shuttle program" it was scheduled to be decommissioned. However, we should probably have had Orion ready before we let go of it.
Oh no. Bush Jr. killed the shuttle. It's just that Obama didn't pull the knife out when he killed its replacement.
Not only that but I believe it takes an inherent type of stupidity and ego to run for office.
Not always, but it definitely takes a special type of selfish evil to
stay in office. It's only natural for people to want to fix things, and sometimes (very rarely - and getting rarer every year) those people manage to achieve office, and then they either fix things or find things are unfixable. In either case they don't stick around after.
I'm not sure I agree that we don't have a future. Some of us will survive. The smart ones. The ones with a lifetime supply of fanta and sailor moon posters.
I mean long term. If not in the short long term then definitely in the really long term. Eventually the sun will run out of hydrogen.
Like I've said before: extinction is for chumps.
I would not mess with Buzz. Heck no. I attended a talk by an astronaut a couple months ago, though. Never have I seen a better example of resting on your laurels for 20 years than I did then. I guess go into space once and be set for life with speaking fees.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of "speaking fees" either, but I guess some people have to do what they have to do. But Buzz and company are all right; they are literally the best people you could ever hope to know.
Agreed. I hope everyone who worked hard to get us to the moon felt satisfaction from that. That was a truly amazing effort from a time when we all worked together.
It was exactly what I've wanted to do for sooooo long I can't even tell you. Except I would have wanted to have had a cricket bat handy. Some have said it was probably a mistake, but I personally feel that for some people who have proven themselves impervious to courteous logic, facts, and reason, well the only thing left is to haul them out back of the woodshed and give them a whuppin.
There's literally nothing on Mars, why would we waste money going there?
Because the moon is sooo 1969. But seriously, because our future really is Out There. It always has been, ever since the first humans sitting on that beach in south Africa first wondered what was in the next cove over. And the day we turn our gaze inward into our own navels is the day we're well and truly fucked.
From a less philosophical standpoint, the technology to get us to Mars can take us all sorts of places. And do all sorts of things. Do it right and we'll suddenly turn all those scary near earth asteroids into money. I believe even the smallest of them contains something like $25 trillion (yes, with a 't') worth of nickel, never mind the rare earths and other goodies like tantalum and niobium. And then there are the environmental benefits. You cannot tell me that mining and refining in space is somehow preferable to shit like mountain top removal and refiner slag leaching down here on earth. But before we can do any of that we have to somehow first work out how, and a "waste of money" mission to Mars is a really good step towards that.
And even if it is a "waste of money", given the choice between pushing out the boundaries of possibility going to Mars or wasting money buying legos for lazy manbabies, I say Mars or Bust!
tl;dr:
