Posted on 02/06/2010 8:58:52 AM PST by Prospero
They come down...
Funny how gravity works...;-)
If we do, it sounds like we're abandoning them, and not to anyone friendly.
I’m down with that. Everything I’ve ever read dealing with NASA after the heroic age paints a picture of a “bloated, bureaucratic, risk-averse, mundane organization”.
Jim Oberg’s “Star-Crossed Orbits” (about the ISS and the corrupt Burrough’s “Dragonfly” (about NASA/Mir), Mike Mullane’s hilarious and heartbreaking “Riding Rockets” (about the early shuttle years, and many more all show variations on that theme.
I think it’s a historical accident that the unusual but effective, brief, government-run crash project to get us to the moon before the russkies was, instead of being demobilized, given a permanent blanket authority over all U.S. space ventures of any kind.
After Skylab NASA should have been relegated to space probes and certain scientific programs but having an exclusive monopoly for launching payloads was clearly ludicrous.
My favorite book is the late G. Harry Stine’s 1996 “Halfway to Anywhere”, mainly about the saga of the DC-X experiment. In the last part of the book, he goes into some detail about what a camel-designed-by-committee the space shuttle is and draws fascinating parallels to the early history of commercial aviation and some funny conjecture regarding what would have happened if the U.S. gov’t had maintained control of all civilian air travel.
Let alone the other inventions and developments that came from the space programs as spinoffs. Isn’t that where our modern day consumer computers were born?
One giant step for Obamakind, one giant step backwards for America!
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