“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” Mark Twain.
I think that any space exploration program with its basis in manned-flight is dumber than roast beef on white bread. It can be done, but you’re ruining the meat of the thing.
You want real “science”, look at our current crop of Mars rovers. These little guys, designed to survive for three months, are into their 5th year of operations. That’s doing it right and I am {expletive deleted} proud to have been part of the team that launched those bad-boys.
The Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, on the other hand, are junk. You couldn’t pay me enough to ride on one of those Shuttles. Two and a half million parts, baby. One chance in 100 of death. What is the big {expletive deleted} deal about chucking a dude into low-Earth orbit, anyway?
“We’re building the technology to colonize space! We need to be able to survive for years to get to Mars!”
{Expletive (two) deleted}. We don’t have the money to get to Mars.
When we launch a Space Shuttle – and pardon me while I liberally exaggerate – 90% of the weight of the thing is for the purpose of getting one mile off the ground. The fuel weights 20x more than the orbiter itself, foshizzle! If I want to put a new space-toilet on the ISS, it’s gonna cost me $10-20,000 per pound. But if I want to ship a Spirit Beast toy to Australia, it’ll cost me less than $50, PLUS someone on the other end will sign for the thing to prove to me that my package arrived.
We cannot get to Mars because we cannot get off the Earth; that’s the big problem. We’re still using – and still planning on using – technology good ole Werner Von Braun developed for the Nazis. It’s almost 2010 and we’re launching man into space via chemical rockets, same as we were in the 1950. Where’s my anti-gravity platform? Where’s my orbital escalator? Where’s my true “takes off like a plane and soars into orbit” vehicle?
I’ll tell you {expletive (plural) deleted} where they are; waiting for anywhere but Earth-orbit to be Profitable.
If you told the citizens of the world that there was gold on the moon, we’d be there. If you told ‘em that, due to the 1/6th gravity environment on the moon, we could develop a drug that cured cancer, we’d be there. There’s nothing on the moon. It’s an inert, worthless chunk of rock. The US went to the moon so we could say we’d beaten the Russians there. But once that ego-trip was satisfied, we haven’t been back. Why? There’s no profit in it.
Is there profit in Earth-orbiting satellites? Darn tootin’ there is. I subscribe to Sirius and I shall never be without that service. Weather satellites provide early warning to natural disasters and save countless lives and untold billions of dollars. Military satellites provide intelligence and communications necessary to defeat our enemies and keep us safe. And TV satellites beam high-quality pr0n into our homes to keep us satisfied. Unmanned, Earth-orbiting satellites, baby; there’s money in that niche. Which is why there are so many companies and countries that provide that service.
Has any space-based platform provided more “science” than the Hubble Space Telescope? It has been upgraded four times and the fifth mission is almost here. This is what the Space Shuttle does best, which is not saying a lot. The thing gets into orbit with a malfunctioning satellite, repairs it, and keeps it cranking out science. It’s too bad that the one thing it can do well is the one thing it’s never really been allowed to do, because we’ve been too busy spending billions on the ISS, which neither generates revenue nor advances science. Unless one considers studying long-term space-survival as “science”, but seeing as how we don’t have the trillions of dollars needed to even start going to Mars, knowing how to survive the trip is mostly moot. Instead of building the worthless ISS with its brand-new multi-million dollar urine recycling system – no joke – what if we have developed a couple of upgraded Hubble satellites and Mars rovers and used “low-cost” conventional rockets to launch them all over the past 20 years?
I don’t have a PhD in rocket science. I am not privy to the inner-workings of any government agency. And nobody’s job is more dependent upon the space industry than mine; launching Space Shuttles and expendable rockets keeps food on my kitchen table. I just wish the science-fantasy freaks who want to start trekking where no man has gone before would take a back-seat to the people who know how to make money.
You wanna make NASA work? Make {expletive deleted} Mark Cuban the director. Put advertisements on the Shuttle: Rocket Fuel energy drink on the external tank and Trojan condoms on the Solid Rocket Boosters. Instead of the US flag and the NASA meatball logo on the astronauts suits, how about we hook them up like race-car drivers with ads for Snickers and Mobil 1. If we’re not going to lawn-dart the ISS into the Pacific ocean, how about an international lottery for a chance to visit the dump. Stop spending more money on the ISS altogether and generate a Satellite-based broadband Internet system that provides every man, woman, and Warcraft addict a solid Internet connection and fee-based pr0n everywhere on the planet.
Do I have to think of everything?
Nobody ever claimed that “logic” has any place in the government, Daniel-san!
Having a bad day at work, are we?
Having spent time in the military and dealing with various government agencies, I know exactly what you mean. This argument is similar in concept to the introduction of a socialized medical system in the US. It is beyond impractical.
I wonder what event prompted this post. It must’ve been a doozy.
Logic. Goverment’s mortal enemy. Working for the grand state of PA (there’s sarcasm in there somewhere) there have been lots of times where the downright logical just doesn’t take place. Frustating as hell, you bet.
Have you read Zubrin’s “The Case for Mars?” I was just talking about it with a co-worker and the guy seems to have a thorough plan for Mars. I mean, he still has no real reason to go there in the first place except that we can. Even if we buy in to the idea of making Mars an off-site backup for the human race in case of planetary crisis, there’s still a thousand-year terraforming process that would take longer than anything people have ever tried to do (except “Avoid becoming lunch for the Saber-Toothed Tiger” or “Live in Europe”). I can see the point for the Moon and Jupiter (the fusion power source stuff) and the asteroid belt (the enormous mineral deposits), but Mars is kind of a mystery to me.
He does spend a lot of time ranting about NASA, so If mentioning that guy is a faux pas then I’m not trying to be randomly offensive.
I’d like to share a quote from one of my favorite sci-fantasy shows. Babylon 5, (season 1, episode “infection”)
****************
Mary Ann Cramer: I have to ask you the same question people back home are asking about space these days. Is it worth it? Should we just pull back? Forget the whole thing as a bad idea, and take care of our own problems, at home.
Cmdr. Jeffrey Sinclair: No. We have to stay here. And there’s a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you’ll get ten different answers, but there’s one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us. It’ll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and – all of this – all of this – was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.
****************
END QUOTE
****************
bit of personal trivia, my dad was a machinist (made chunks of metal into useful parts) and built some peices of the lunar lander.
My mom’s 4th husband (my dad being her 5th) was a computer guy that designed one of the backup systems that didn’t fail on apollo 13.
****************
Those dry fuel boosters you speak of, I was once told a story of why they happen to be the size that they are.
Apparently, the company that makes them has to ship by railroad through a mountain, the tunnel through the mountain is only big enough to allow a normal sized railroad car through.
The size of the railroad car is based on the size of the rails it runs on, which have been a standard since before the time of the old west and the making of the trans-continental railroad.
The original rails were laid down and the cars tooled by people that used to make wagons.
Wagons were created a specific width for centuries because they had to fit the ruts left in the roadways in europe. the ruts were left by roman charioteers, which were a little wider than the width of their horses.
So, following that chain of logic… the rockets that put our shuttle into space were designed by a horses…
I cannot verify the truth to this, but it’s still a funny story.
I couldn’t agree more with you. I support NASA, but stop with the manned BS right now. Develop the technology on the ground to get humans to other planets, but until then stop wasting money on ISS and build more robots to search the galaxy for us. We should have a robot on every planet, moon, and large asteroid in the galaxy getting much more information than the ISS could ever hope to do.
Yeah, I do have to agree that the manned missions are not really worth the monetary cost, and the cost in lives. the overall goal however is.
Now, if the ISS was going to eventually become an orbital spacedock to launch missions from, (avoiding the energy expenditure to escape the atmosphere/gravity well) it would be much more worth it.
I would be in favor of using a railgun to launch things into orbit. (http://science.howstuffworks.com/rail-gun.htm)
I am going to take full credit for this post.
As I recall I asked for more NASA posts in the TNB chat prior or during Llanion’s live recorded Interview.
Yes, a lot of heat in this article. But you make several excellent points. The concept of going to Mars has always baffled my mind. Space exploration, and huge investments in scientific projects, yeah I have no problem with that. How it’s expended is often problematic.
It’s amusing to me that you emphasize the value of the next mission, STS-125, that will service Hubble one last time to replace gyros, upgrade optics, and attach a new detector. COS, Cosmic Origins Spectrometer (spectrograph?) is being added to Hubble in that mission. A guild mate of mine is one of the lead members of that project team, and is currently in Orlando watching COS get loaded onto the shuttle last weekend. That launch has been postponed for over a year.
We’ve had lots of chats about that project and technology. It’s ironic that, of all the missions that NASA thought was cool, servicing Hubble to keep it up another 10 years was orginally tabled do to cost issues. Of all the missions NASA had going, they wanted to cancel servicing Hubble.
It strikes me that while the U.S. Government doles out the money, NASA is basically the one picking and advocating what programs and missions it wants to fly. It takes NSF money and university programs to push the “unmanned” missions. Presumably it’s because NASA is still enamoured with the “astronaut” aspects of it’s programs, rather than the “Space Exploration”.
Thanks for sharing, as always.
Oh, and also, what a wonderful quote to start off your rank. Witty as always.
The program did a huge disservice to Von Braun when they moved him from Marshall to Headquarters and fired the rest of the Germans. Von Braun and his team wanted to move toward nuclear propulsion because in the 70′s we were already 99% efficient with our current propulsion system. At the time, nuclear anything was considered a risky venture and this research was shut down.
I must agree. I’m all for exploring space. But don’t send humans out there to explore. Theres no point as of right now. Send the unmanned machines in. They last longer up there than we can.
Doing what is efficient and productive has never been the government’s caveat. That’s why any government intervention, program, etc. is usually (or better should be) met with a lot of resistance. I can’t think of any one program that the government currently runs that isn’t too big, too expensive, too inefficient. Why should NASA be any different. If we cut the funds off from NASA in 5 years and said that after the 5 years is up, you have to be self-sufficient, maybe… just maybe they could do it and the truly worthwhile missions and projects would pass to the front of the line and we might actually make some progress instead of launching toilets to the ISS for cosmonauts to pee on.
Instead we just keep shoveling money into all of these agencies, programs, departments etc. and we tell them “Do…… whatever.”
Yea lets put Trojan on the side of the rocket that sounds good
“Trojan we keep your load safe”
Let’s go back to sending monkeys, everyone loves monkeys, make it a pay per view event.
on a serious note: i nodded a couple of times during your article.
on a not so serious not: hmmm gyros….
Did you ever read Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold The Moon”? The protagonist funded the mission by claiming the moon was covered with diamonds (among other schemes). He even stashed some diamonds on the ship so he could claim to have found them on the moon, only to discover that the moon was in fact covered with them.
The point of the story was that if space were ever truly going to be explored it would have to be done by private business, with the intent of making money at it.
Dan, tell us how you really feel about manned space flight, will yer?
I think in economically hard times people look for obvious government waste – and justly so. NASA is hugely overblown kingdom of bureaucrats stifling innovation and commercialization of space technology. NASA’s history and raison d’etre are well known and the agency is discussed today like you talk about a grandfather who had Alzheimer for years – with loving memory for the good times and the hope that nature will take him out of his misery soon.
So, yes, NASA needs to privatize – I have long been lobbying for toothpaste adds on the solid fuel boosters but never thought of condoms adds. Great idea!
But don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Manned space flight will happen, that much is certain. Man has always strained to stay in one place and Eric the Red was clearly driven by the same zeal as Neil Armstrong. But there are other ways to do this. Burt Rutan has shown us how – put engineering and industry to work and you have manned spaceflight “for the masses”. The US government funded the first passenger ship service across the Atlantic, the US postal service across the nation, the railway tracks etc. And then they stepped away from the investment and let business reign. And that time has come for NASA.
The Space Shuttle puts food on my table, and I was involved in Spirit and Opportunity as a AF maintenance controller and I agree with most of your post. But, we do need to get back to the moon before China gets there. The reason? Helium-3! Read all about it…
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/1283056.html?page=4
Some very interesting thoughts. Seems to me that we neeed a factory in space to build the vehicles to go further. Which would mean sending lots of materials up. Maybe a moon base with manufacturing facilities.
Maybe a “Moon Lazer”…..mwahahahah
Dr. Evil didn’t have a problem.
Ah, the Mars Rovers… The proverbial “Energizer Bunnies” made real… They keep going and going and going…
I don’t think advertising is the key to increase NASA funding. No, if NASA wants to increase funding, they should be at the forefront of finding an alternate fuel source that is cheap and renewable. It would benefit all of their vehicles, manned and unmanned, and at the same time could possibly get our country off of our oil addiction. After further consideration I’m wrong. Advertising would be key. If NASA were to advertise they were doing this research, it could increase the agency’s popularity and approval ratings, which would bring in the congressional funding. Now’s the time to do this too. Democrats spend and Obama has already stated he wants to get off the oil tit.
I’m aghast. Maybe I misinterpreted this post Dan, maybe it was all in sarcasm, but I can’t believe what I’m hearing here from you, an insider.
“I think that any space exploration program with its basis in manned-flight is dumber than roast beef on white bread.”
Mankind has been exploring it’s limits since creation, and could very well be the reason for its success as dominant species on this tiny planet. Why do you think this drive should be discouraged?
“You couldn’t pay me enough to ride on one of those Shuttles”
You help launch them, but have no faith in them? Conflict of interest?
[quote of a quote] “We’re building the technology to colonize space! We need to be able to survive for years to get to Mars!”
To my knowledge, NASA has been semi-self-funding itself by rocketing commercial satellites into orbit for cell phones, Google Earth, and GPS for quite a while. Yes, these projects have both commercial and governmental value, but while they are up there they are also conducting experiments and have made multiple discoveries in science, medicine, and biology; the least of which could be TANG and VELCRO. =)
“{Expletive (two) deleted}. We don’t have the money to get to Mars.”
Who’s we? The country may need to make some budget cuts, but there are now wealthy entrepreneurs that are exploring the option of NEO space ‘cruise-lines that would have never been possible without the efforts of our space program, e.g. Richard Branson. The White Star Line would have never been able to build and launch the Titanic if Christopher Columbus had never voyaged west past his point of no return. I know, bad example, but I’m hoping you can appreciate the irony.
“But if I want to ship a Spirit Beast toy to Australia, it’ll cost me less than $50, PLUS someone on the other end will sign for the thing to prove to me that my package arrived.”
Irrelevant. NASA is not UPS.
“We cannot get to Mars because we cannot get off the Earth; that’s the big problem.”
EXCUSE ME? Have you been drinking? Getting off Earth is the first step for exploring space and we do it all the time!
“We’re still using – and still planning on using – technology good ole Werner Von Braun developed for the Nazis.”
That was less than a century ago. Technologically impatient? I still ride a bicycle, when was that invented; and how much has it actually improved since then? I saw the old Disney cartoon in school; it’s got brakes now, and gears, big whoop!
“There’s nothing on the moon. It’s an inert, worthless chunk of rock.”
Danny, you may wanna read Buzz Aldrin’s book. He’s been there.
“Unless one considers studying long-term space-survival as “science”, but seeing as how we don’t have the trillions of dollars needed to even start going to Mars, knowing how to survive the trip is mostly moot.”
YOU should know more than any of us that NASA and the US Government moves at the speed of wood. In these fast-paced times we look back to our childhood and ask, “Where are my flying cars?” but that was just an ad-campaign created by corporations and cartoons.
Sky-Lab crashed to earth. Why? Because it was considered junk. Projects like the ISS and the Shuttle are an effort to build an orbital base to construct future vehicles for stellar and eventually interstellar travel. As you pointed out, escaping Earth appears to be the biggest challenge. Studies have shown that orbital construction would be far more feasible than building on the surface and attempting to launch the bulk in one piece, regardless of what you might see in the Star Trek Movie on May 8th.
“You wanna make NASA work? Make {expletive deleted} Mark Cuban the director.”
I would elect Richard Branson over Mark Cuban. Mark’s last name disturbs me =P
Sorry, Danny Boy, I have tremendous respect for your intellect; but for this particular average joe I think this post is completely misguided. Your personal affairs might have clouded your judgement and maybe career disillusionment might be a factor. I don’t know, mate, but this rant mate almost no sense to me whereas everything else I have ever read from you seems well thought out and calculated.
I have nothing but well-wishes for you and your family and I mean no disrespect to you. I was just shocked to see something like this come from a man in your position. Buddies for Life. Come back to WoW!
John Miller
aka Freejack
I don’t know. You make a lot of good points about unmanned space programs. Yet manned space flights seem to be what grabs peoples attention and keeps the machine going..
“international lottery for a chance to visit the dump.” If ever person in the world gave five dollers for the chance, per shuttle flight, to ride on it? That would not only be awesome but probably would pay for the thing to boot. Not saying everyone would.. but millionaires would probably start losing a million or two in buying ticket/bragging rights every few flights. (And would be dashed when a waitress in NYC won it. >D)
Freejack: I have no doubt that Daniel is not against putting people in space. Putting people in space right now is a bad idea, though. It’s way too expensive for far too little benefit. Currently the only motivation to send people to Mars is to have done it. We can do far more science for much less money if it’s done by robots. People on Mars shouldn’t happen until we need people on Mars. By then, we should have a much more developed infrastructure to put them there.
Roadcone: Helium 3 is certainly valuable, once we develop a commercial process to use it. I suspect we’ll commercialize much less efficient forms of fusion before we spend the billions (trillions?) necessary to get production ramped up on the moon. It may also be a lot more feasible to extract helium 3 from other sources (like the more gaseous planets).
I agree and disagree with this.
As an engineer, I think it’s mental that we’re still using rocketry for space flight. It’s massively wasteful considering we’re effectively squandering limited resources to fight gravity. It’s not sustainable and it never will be unless we find some way to reduce the energy lost. Hydrogen lift for example, or some favourable energy exchange with returning material to earth. We’re just squandering resources mindlessly at the moment and it’s costing us.
On the other hand, I’m sitting here at my desk with a research paper called “Gravitational and Space Biology”. From my own perspective, the ISS research is not going to be irrelevant – it’s going to mean massive breakthroughs in mechanoregulation.
What does this mean to the man on the street? Major improvements in Orthopaedic implants.
Even if we double the lifespan of a single implant, the hip replacement, you’re talking about considerable long term savings and quality of life improvements. Put it this way – 250,000 hip replacements each year, just in the US alone, at 30k a piece.
At the moment, you need a really good reason to put one of these in someone under the age of about 50 – because in 10 years time, it’ll have to be yanked out again.
That’s a single implant, we’re not even talking about savings due to things like Osteoporosis treatments, and the reduced burden on healthcare as a result.
As far as payloads go, it’s better to get something up and keep it there, than to keep sending the material back and forth. That’s why I think the ISS recycling is a good idea. Every kilo of water they don’t have to supply is (taking your figure of 20k per pound) 44,000 saved.
From first principles, an average human uses about 3.7L of water a day in their prime (or should). So that’s $162,800 worth of lift per man per day. Lets assume that (one way or another, between system weights and loss) the system is 0.8 effective at reducing this need. That’s $130,240 saved every day for every person in space. It should pay for itself in the long run.
Honestly, I think that that is the kind of development we need. There’s a saying here, “Penny wise, Pound Foolish” – in the long run, a wise investment now, stops us squandering resources over and over.
*Sigh* It’s a complex thing with no real “right” answer.
Daniel-
I would be interested in your thoughts on this:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bill_stone_explores_the_earth_and_space.html
A compelling talk that I found literally 3 hours before reading your post.
Long time reader and 2nd time poster,
Laz
The reason we put humans up there is for PR and because we need heroes that kids can imagine themselves to be who are doing something peaceful and that requires lots of education. That being said, the humans should be a tiny, tiny part of it. I also think having the ISS is a silly idea that is taking way too much money away from the real science.
But if all we did was have shuttle crews used for repairing satellites or telescopes, people would see them as nothing but fancy maintenance men. So we need to come up with something that captures people’s imaginations again and have them do real experiments. I was disappointed they never brought a teacher up. I remember Christa McAuliffe. I always felt that by not bringing a teacher up after her that they were saying that they made a mistake and I think that’s wrong. I think it also insults her memory and I think that has affected my/our generation.
Daniel,
I think I emailed you a while back about the space program and you said something to the effect of this post. I remember thinking you were wrong and that man needed to explore space firsthand.
After getting into astronomy a bit, I think I completely agree with you now. We need to have someone like Mark Cuban start a space exploration gig that will crank out modular, cheap, light, simple, and sturdy rovers, probes, and orbiters. Why in the hell do we not have rovers, probes and mapping orbiters on every planet and moon in this star system? If you take all the “important” planetary bodies, moons, and asteroids in this star system, we know a bit (not all) about 1 of them (Earth), and a very very small amount of 2 of them(Moon, Mars). We’ve got about 1-2% of all the important bodies in our star system figured out. (probably less)
If NASA is bitching about the costs of these explorers, then they need to take a close look at them. For this blanketing project, put radar imaging, cameras, infrared imaging on the orbiters, and video, sound, cameras, and maybe a drill/analyzer on the rover. THATS IT. Keep it simple. Keep it cheap and light. No exotic experiments, no complicated or delicate equipment. Essential basic data gathering, mapping, and recording of every important body in our star system. THEN, if you find something earth shattering you might have the public support and will to bring more complex machines or even humans there.
Right now, we send in these multi-million (billion?) dollar satellites and rovers that are extremely complex and delicate with so many different tests and experiments that it’s hard to keep track of. You’ve got to get the cost and weight and simplicity DOWN, so we can send MORE of them out to the really important stuff around our neighborhood. The argument that this can’t be done is weak and tired. SpaceX has lowered costs in some cases 4 fold to get into orbit- probably even more with Falcon9. It can be done, people are doing it.
Anyone know why we haven’t sent a probe or sat to Phobos since the Russians did with Phobos 1 and 2? The Russians think they see a UFO there, some scientists think it might be hollow, and we don’t think that’s worth at least checking out? I’m with you Daniel, I think the reason we’re all frustrated is because the technology and industry is HERE to do this in an economical way. There isn’t anything really stopping us from knowing so much more about our own star system. People think we know everything about it and that all the scientists and astronomers have figured it all out. If that’s the case, can you tell me if Pluto is a planet or not this week?
(seriously, I’d like to know.)
IMO the scariest thing about a manned mission to the moon is you also need to come back.
Think about it. The Earth travels through space at approx. 29.5 km/s (roughly 106,200 km/h or 66,400 m/h) and the trip from the moon back to the Earth takes approx. 76 hours (or did, when Apollo 11 made it). That means when you leave the Moon you need to be aiming for where the Earth will be 76 hours from now, and that’s approx. 8 million kilometres or 5 million miles from its current location.
The Earth and the Moon are separated by approx. 385,000 km (give or take 20,000 km), so if your calculations are off by just a little bit, even just one minute off, at 29.5 km/s the Earth can travel approx. 1,800 km in just 1 minute. That doesn’t sound like much in the cosmic sense of things, but the Earth is barely 12,750 km in diameter (approx.) so in 10 minutes it will move 1 1/2 times it’s own diameter. In other words, in order to ensure you hit your 29.5 km/s, 12,750 kilometre-wide target, from 385,000 km and 76 hours away, you need to have less than 0.22% margin of error in your calculations.
What does that equate to?
The Earth moves at approx. 29.5 km/s through space, but it’s difficult to judge exactly how fast it moves. A 0.22% margin of error based on 29.5 km/s means if the Earth moves slower than 29.435 km/s or faster than 29.565 km/s, you’re dead in the water, or space as it were.
Daniel helping to launch manned shuttles into orbit but not willing to go up himself is not a conflict of interest (IMO), it just means he’s not willing to accept those 1:100 odds of a failed launch. He knows how much safety and planning goes into preparing for a launch, but he also knows that in spite of all the preparation, that 1 in 100 launches will fail, potentially fatally. Daniel is not prepared to accept those risks just to go into space. Other Astronauts are, Dan is not.
Gotta tell ya BRK, I greatly enjoy your writing, and will read on endlessly. I’ll admit though that every time I see a wow reference, I grow excited for a sec. You really made an impact on me lol.
In any case, you’re full of brilliant ideas… too bad you work for the biggest corporation ever: the us government. Bummer….
RA Heinlein was smart in his short story “The Man Who Sold the Moon” when he had the protagonist D.D. Harriman sneak a bag of uncut diamonds onto his lunar lander to be thrown out on the ground before the landing party got out. That’s why we need to go back, so somebody can run the con properly this time around.
Curing cancer isn’t economically viable at this time. See reference: Diabetes.
Time for some fun…
This article shows entry-level use of randomly embedded hypertext that was all the rage in 1995 when HTML was becoming mainstream, people were still surfing with Mosaic, and most of the world ended with edu or gov. Write your story, and here and there in random appropriate locations, link your text to something else that might enrich the experience of your readers should they choose to follow the link. Nicely Done! /golf-clap 4u
However, you missed the perfect opportunity. There’s a line in your second-to-last block of text that really could use some hypertext lovin’….
…launching Space Shuttles and expendable rockets keeps food on my kitchen table.
Link back to your own {expletive deleted} steak post!
Do I have to think of everything?
AND Now for something completely different.
Whenever life get you down, Mrs. Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft
And you feel that you’ve had quite enu-hu-hu-huuuuff
Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour
That’s orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it’s reckoned
A sun that is the source of all our power
The sun and you and me, and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way
Our galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars
It’s 100,000 light-years side-to-side
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light-years thick
But out by us it’s just 3000 light-years wide
We’re 30,000 light-years from galactic central point
We go round every 200 million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whiz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light you know
Twelve million miles a minute and that’s the fastest speed there is
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space
Because there’s bugger all down here on Earth
- My compliments to Eric Idle for writing this song.
http://www.sjaa.net/eph/0312/b.html
Manned space flight does not make sense if your objective is science.
The objective of space exploration is not exclusively scientific. Robots cannot bring living space back to us. Robots cannot move ideas out into the cosmos. If we wish to preserve our lives (see above post about the sun expiring someday) and our way of life, we must move PEOPLE into space. It has to happen EVENTUALLY. The ones who get there first have a big leg up on the ones who get there SECOND. So we gotta do it sometime, I’d rather it was now and I’d rather it was us.
Oh, and quintiple NASA’s budget. Space exploration is the closest thing humanity has to a “destiny”.
Rule of Acquisition, #3: “Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to.”
I, as well, have a pit-bull who will be the most sensitive animal I have ever owned. Quickly, a new dog breed will can come along for the media to blast, because they have performed rotties and dobies in prior years. Unfortunate that media sensationalism breeds much inaccurate details.
I have a wordpress blog and I would like to remove everything (it’s hosted on my own domain and hosting) because I would like to delete my site. How can I save my blog posts in a folder or something in my documents (offline) because I don’t want to delete everything completely. Can I do that in one go, if I can even do it ? Thank you !.