Posted on 01/29/2012 9:05:14 AM PST by Rummyfan
Had I been asked to deliver the State of the Union address, it would not have delayed your dinner plans:
"The State of our Union is broke, heading for bankrupt, and total collapse shortly thereafter. Thank you and goodnight! You've been a terrific crowd!"
I gather that Americans prefer something a little more upbeat, so one would not begrudge a speechwriter fluffing it up by holding out at least the possibility of some change of fortune, however remote. Instead, President Obama assured us at great length that nothing is going to change, not now, not never. Indeed the Union's state – its unprecedented world-record brokeness – was not even mentioned.
(Excerpt) Read more at ocregister.com ...
What a sad and weak people Americans have degenerated into to be against a vision of pioneering space.
Maybe they’ll wake up when there’s a Chinese Communist Party logo emblazoned across the lunar surface.
He laughs at his own jokes. Thinks they are hilarious. Same reason the incessant chuckling of Dennis Miller and his sycophant make his show hard to listen to.
While I would love to have a moon base, I think Gingrich should detail how it would be paid for, given our current financial mess. What would he cut to support this spending?
While I would love to have a moon base, I think Gingrich should detail how it would be paid for, given our current financial mess. What would he cut to support this spending?
This is usually what happens before a civilization dies. It turns inward in an appeal to address its internal problems, dismissing innovation, exploration, and expansion. And then the civilization simply disappears into irrelevance.
Once we have spending under control and are reducing the debt to a manageable level and we aren’t electing leftists maybe we could actually do that.
Newt needs to stop proposing new federal spending programs
Except that won’t ever happen if there’s no bold and creative vision to go forward on. The US will simply commit slow suicide, mired in stasis and stagnation.
People like you are the reason civilizations die.
A moon base is an exciting idea. Someone should write a movie about it.
Will a TV series do? Remember Space: 1999? In that series, the Moon venture was used to make the Moon a high-tech Yucca Mountain, a place to put all the radioactive trash, to make the whole effort worthwhile. With unforeseen consequences and catastrophic results, both Moon-side and Earth-side.
If you really want to make a movie, there are several stories, from the Cold War years, describing a joint venture of multiple nations building and occupying such colonies. In the vast majority of the stories it wasn't one country in the venture, but a consortium. In 2001: A Space Odyssey the space station was multi-country, although in the same structure, and the Moon colonies were separate but dependent on each other.
Even in the Star Trek universe, the moon settlement was not the efforts of a single country, or continent.
My candidate: Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. The story of the exploitation of the Moon's resources for the benefit of the Lunar Authority, a bureaucracy of the successor to the United Nations, makes for an interesting cause of a revolution.
If we’d invested in the Moon instead of that worthless space station we could have had a colony there. Use guided craft to drop prefab sections (just like the station) and put a crew there to put the most important pieces together and then stay there till the next ship arrives.
Right. I am totally in favor of going farther, it’s just that this country is bankrupt and the politicians refuse to do anything about it.
Are you kidding? Teflon:
It is commonly believed that Teflon, like velcro, is a spin-off product from the NASA space projects. However, that is not so, even though both products have been used by NASA. (A href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene>Source)Don't like Wikipedia? Try:
Tang, Teflon, and Velcro, are not spinoffs of the Space Program. General Foods developed Tang in 1957, and it has been on supermarket shelves since 1959. In 1962, when astronaut John Glenn performed eating experiments in orbit, Tang was selected for the menu, launching the powdered drink’s heightened public awareness. NASA also raised the celebrity status of Teflon, a material invented for DuPont in 1938, when the Agency applied it to heat shields, space suits, and cargo hold liners. Velcro was used during the Apollo missions to anchor equipment for astronauts’ convenience in zero gravity situations. Although it is a Swiss invention from the 1940s, it has since been associated with the Space Program. (Source)Solar cells were first developed in 1954 by Bell Labs. They have been used in the space program since before NASA exisited. But saying they are a spin-off from the space program is a bit like saying that airplanes are a spin-off from NASA because NASA uses airplanes too. There is a NASA web page that explains how solar cells work. Their claim there is that: "Through the space programs, the [solar cell] technology advanced."
As for personal computers, the claim that NASA had anything to do with them is a bit like suggesting that they developed electricity. Intel developed the first microprocessor (4004) , and that development had nothing to do with the space program. It was developed for a small electronic calculators. The first microprocessor I programmed was an Intel 8080. At that time the company I was working for also had some project going on for the Shuttle program. That project used a minicomputer. Intel kept improving their micros and none of those improvements had anything to do with government contracts so far as I know. IBM developed the PC using an Intel 8088 for the hobbyist market. It was a sort of afterthought for them then. If you look at the Wiki page for Personal Computers, you will see that NASA isn't even mentioned.
ML/NJ
big BUMP
My candidate: Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. The story of the exploitation of the Moon's resources for the benefit of the Lunar Authority, a bureaucracy of the successor to the United Nations, makes for an interesting cause of a revolution.
And the beauty part of the story was that the economic motivation for going to the moon was to use it as a penal colony with slave labor to exploit the resource. Heinlein realized that any real colonization requires an economic rational.
Newt's moon base to harvest He3 only makes sense if you have a working fusion technology (only 20 years away, always).
But there are plenty of worrisome rocks in Near Earth Orbit. Apophis is scheduled to make a very close pass in some 26 odd years. It would be nice if we could nudge it out of the way if need be.
Exactly right. This is why Newt's idea isn't crazy or grandiose, it's exactly the right medicine for an ailing nation. If everyone thought space exploration was more important than frakking welfare for moochers, the nanny state would be history and we would be the first starfaring nation.
This is the kind of rhetoric that is so worrying with Newt. he just can’t control himself. obama will eat him in the Fall if he gets the chance. After the last 2 debates we geet to see how short the ‘Great Debater” Newt falls when he’s on the defensive all night. Not a pretty sight.
I generally agree with Mark Steyn but the Newt bashing is getting to be a little much.
I don’t like the idea of spending billions on a moon base, but in this case it very really may be an important national security issue. China has already made it quite clear they plan to send a man to the moon in the next few years and establish a base on the moon. What happens if the Chinese set up a base, say “sorry folks, we are withdrawing from all those silly space treaties and by the way the entire moon is now Chinese territory.” What could we do about it? Very little it would seem... China would control the ultimate “high ground”.
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