Does anyone long for the glory days?

The "BR" as stated, I doubt anybody is against that. Those old schoolers would be like one dude in his basement spending his own cash figuring stuff out and developing theories.

Up from that, to billions upon billions of tax dollars paying hundreds of workers and scientists a nice living to study rocks a million miles away. Or take deep space pictures.

There is an opposite to everything. The good and the bad. Speak of some fancy medical cure to something. Well the same technology equally created some virus that kills people just the same. We've invented as many problems as have cured. As many lives saved as destroyed.

It all balances out in the end.

Anyway, that's my opinion, frankly, when I hear about listening for space radio waves, or shooting things into orbit. I'm just like, what the heck? Millions of dollars wasted so some college grads can have a job.
Or maybe another way to think of it is, there ARE BETTER ways to spend the cash. There just is.
 
SNGX1275 said:
Did I just witness people saying nasa sucks, and then all the sudden change their view because MrG stepped in?
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If that is true, cool :)
I know I'm right, and it's good to see other realise that! :cool:
;) :D

Vigilante> I'm not quite sure how any old-schooler would be able to build CERN's LHC, let alone fit it in their basement, but the research is still incredibly valuable because of what it teaches us. Granted, they don't try to send the LHC into space, but a lot of astronomy related work takes place solely in Earth...

I could probably spend hours on end writing about this and related topics, but there's a ray-tracer to be written and Tokenizer/parser which I really should finish, so I'll let you off the hook this time :)
 
And when you're done inventing it, let entity X take it to save people, and entity Y take it to kill people.

I'm not wishy washy, I still say NASA sucks. And I still say human kind can get along perfectly fine without all of it just as it did for thousands of years. People still kill people, people still die of disease, people still live the same length of time, people still make a living and raise their families. It's all the same. Only now there is more people, and we do it all more high tech.

"Why, thanks to advances in medical science, people are dieing every day who never looked better!"

One of my favorite quotes :)

I know I'm right
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lol, careful buddy! That's an absolute statement, and no one can make absolute statements unless they have absolute knowledge. And that's absolute! Uh, er, wait a sec...
 
I'm not wishy washy, I still say NASA sucks. And I still say human kind can get along perfectly fine without all of it just as it did for thousands of years.
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Yes this is true, but then it also applies to the works of Shakespeare, Mozart, DaVinic. In someways BR is just another expression of the creative mind of mankind. The desire to understand and explore is as basic to our society as Music, Art, theatre and little midgets greased up wrestling big boned women (ok some of our entertainment is questionable..but you get my point). No I've never seen one of those shows, and no I have nothing against grease.

I think it would be nice if the Arts and Entertainment industry donated a few billion dollars to world hungar and poverty, it's not like they can't afford it. Why does it have to come out of our BR budget?

SOcRatEs thanks for the link, I forgot about the Vinegar Tasters, now that I think of it I think it was TAO tse that said " I know that I know nothing".

One to beam up.
 
And the future holds for us???

All this is nice but it seems to boil down to the one saw.....
"If Edison didn't invent the lightbulb, we would be overclocking our computers in the dark"!

I've been in research for 30 or 40 years, always on the cutting edge of technology, Shape Memory Effect, Non Newtonian Fluids, Lasers, interesting things. Everything trickles down to the consumer sooner or later. Every research project usually has a goal of making money for the researchers in the long run, if only to keep the research going. That wwhat Star Wars, SBIR,Darpa and the others are. Although they are Government funded, and usually have a military idea in mind, all the research fallout is very useful.
I've been priviledged in my life to have been able to work on fusion reactors, superconducting magnets, nuclear submarines,Exo atmospheric kill vehicles. and other stuff.There are always surprise discoveries. This holds true for Space Travel, so I don't think any research is a waste of Dollars.IMHO
 
"We had a 40-year lead in space and we're giving it up," he said. "The U.S. is quibbling over $3 billion to $5 billion. It's amazing to me."
"The American people have no idea how massive the China space program is," Kirok said.


They've said nothing about China's space budget.

Get this, if you look at a Chinese launch pad, you'll see in the background, a farmer plowing the rice patty with on ox.
At least, at the three major us space sites, Kape Canavrel, Houston and Jpl.
Our farmers and ranchers use, quads, tractors and helicopters... :blush:
 
Get this, if you look at a Chinese launch pad, you'll see in the background, a farmer plowing the rice patty with on ox.
At least, at the three major us space sites, Kape Canavrel, Houston and Jpl.
Our farmers and ranchers use, quads, tractors and helicopters... :blush:[/QUOTE]

And Who in their right mind would like to go for a ride on a Chinese rocket???? Granted they have had rockets for over a thousand years, and that should be good experience, still I for one don't think I would want one of their rockets in the air above me.Gravity is not just an adventure, "it's a law".
 
I read somewhere that given the lack of atmosphere and proximity to the sun, if anyone was going to walk the surface of Mars, they've got a good chance of radiation sickness, cancer, etc soon afterwards. So screw that. :)

I'm all up for space exploration if its for useful purpose, the space shuttle has to go though. You know how complicated & inefficient that thing is???

Get some r&d for a more efficient means of getting there (Virgin's already got a good start on this), so we're not dropping huge fuel tanks and rockets into the Atlantic Ocean on every launch.
 
The sad fact is, we wasted the technology that could get us there again. The shortsightedness of the Nixon administration still ripples today. The shuttle was approved at the time they cut the budget for the last three moonlandings 18, 19, and 20. Reagan called the shuttle operational after 3 flights, thus mothballing even our unmanned rocket program. When Challenger blew up we had no way to go into space other than relying on the Soviets or ESA to launch our satellites! Shuttle was America's only launcher and it was grounded. Now the bird will be retired by 2010, (if it ever flies again) and we have no fallback man rated vehicle to take us anywhere! America will always have poor and downtrodden citizens, the situation was the same during Apollo. Not much has changed, so let's do something usefull so that our younger generation has lofty goals as well, not just the next coolest video game. :cool:
 
We have a space race going
on right now and the American people are totally unaware of all this," said Rep
Click to expand...

Um, ya, and so what if they do know? Should we give a flying flipper?
I'm missing the point, so who cares who gets to what when? I'm guessing there is some political conspiracy behind it. Why not let China go land on the moon? Why should we have to "race" them? Why should we care?

This is exactly the nonesense we DON'T need to spend money on. A muscle flexing my rockets are better then your rockets race.

There is not much a human can do on the moon that a well created robot can't do. Grab samples, take readings, send data back, etc... And would cost much less to do.
 
"The American people have no idea how massive the China space program is," Kirok said.
Click to expand...

I never said anything like that. I think it was this Mark Kirk guy. :angel:

I read somewhere that given the lack of atmosphere and proximity to the sun, if anyone was going to walk the surface of Mars, they've got a good chance of radiation sickness, cancer, etc soon afterwards. So screw that
Click to expand...
What? Stop reading children's books then. U.S. has walked on the moon and it has absolutely NO atmosphere and is a lot closer to the sun (the same distance we are). Mars actually does have an atmosphere, thin, but enough to screen out gamma rays, Xrays and some of the UVc band.

Ok back to the China thing. IMO China IS the greatest threat to Western society, this includes you Europeans. The US senate was appaulled with what they heard of the Chinese space program, don't make me laugh, that's just a drop in the bucket compared top what they've been spending on military build up. Yes build up. For what? Not only that they export military equipment/technology to every non U.S. friendly country that can afford it. Why? And so much so they are second only to N. Korea in arms exports world wide.

Their industrial development is growing so fast they are now #2 in oil imports worldwide (US is #1) and they are still just ramping up and are not even 1/3 the way to full development. When the full power of the Chinese economy is realized they can buy England, US, and Europe and have some change left over to explore Mars, Jupitiers and Saturn. That is of course unless U.S, Canada and Europe stop selling out our middle class jobs to China so we can afford cheap crap from Walmart. :dead: And even then OUR governments make no demands on the Chinese communist government (I hate communist or anything Marxist, it doesn't work and is too corruptable) such as: "We trade with you, you trade with us" and "Oh btw stop building so many f**** missles and warships! It does look very friendly".

One family to beam up.
 
technically the moon has an atmosphere - but it's negligiable. Mostly lunar ionized dust.
 
Vigilante said:
I'm missing the point, so who cares who gets to what when? I'm guessing there is some political conspiracy behind it. Why not let China go land on the moon? Why should we have to "race" them? Why should we care?

This is exactly the nonesense we DON'T need to spend money on. A muscle flexing my rockets are better then your rockets race.
Click to expand...
On if you are missing the point: Maybe. (I know you didn't ask if you were, but I am answering anyway)
The problem isn't beating China to the Moon. As I said earlier we already beat them to the Moon. We landed there 6 times, no other country has even done it once. The percieved "problem" that the 'government' has or that people are concerned with is how much China is going to learn about missles, space, and a whole host of other technologies that come out of that.

China's upramping of their military and space program is going to be a big concern, it already is, and its going to get worse. They've got a good thing going for them with that communist society for building military and pushing space technology. Without Russia's government the way it was before and during WW2 they probably wouldn't have been able to eventually recover from the 4 million axis troops that attacked them all at once over a thousand plus mile eastern front.
 
no other country has even done it once. The percieved "problem" that the 'government' has or that people are concerned with is how much China is going to learn about missles, space, and a whole host of other technologies that come out of that.
Click to expand...

So there is a conspiracy then? What does the US "know", that we don't want anybody else to? And to what lengths would we go to keep others at bay? And how would us "racing" them back up into orbit, stop them from learning things anyway?

I wonder if I'm a conpiracy theorist? I hope not :)
 
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