We Stopped Dreaming

Ignore the "inspirational" music. What he says has some truth.

Don't worry, weapon development is alive and well.

We need to get our kids to support the current conflicts. And encourage them to do well in school. For they might design the next drone.

Rofl_Mao wrote: impulse418 wrote: Don't worry, weapon development is alive and well. We need to get our kids to support the current conflicts. And encourage them to do well in school. For they might design the next drone. Weapon development is not alive and well. Maybe for small arms and robotics, but not for future aerospace technology. That technology is what solves todays problems on Earth.There has been a push for privately funded technology, but it is all for-profit and private technology simply cannot do what government funded technology does. The NASA got us to the moon in 8 years; they can do the impossible.

NASA is an inefficient monster.

Rofl_Mao wrote: usafpilot07 wrote: Rofl_Mao wrote: impulse418 wrote: Don't worry, weapon development is alive and well. We need to get our kids to support the current conflicts. And encourage them to do well in school. For they might design the next drone. Weapon development is not alive and well. Maybe for small arms and robotics, but not for future aerospace technology. That technology is what solves todays problems on Earth.There has been a push for privately funded technology, but it is all for-profit and private technology simply cannot do what government funded technology does. The NASA got us to the moon in 8 years; they can do the impossible. NASA is an inefficient monster. How so? I'd say they've done a lot given the budget they have/had.

You'd be wrong then. It was an over-funded ex-Nazi playground for a long time. In fact, until the Mars Sojourner program in the early/mid 1990's NASA had pretty much squandered all their money on expensive and unsustainable programs like the Space Shuttle. There was no economic advantage to using a reusable orbiter, at all. We should have stuck with the Saturn V rocket system and upgraded it instead of spending all that money just to show the world we could make something that they weren't even really interested in.

In fact, the budget cuts that NASA has faced since the Bush Sr. / Clinton years have proved to do more to spur innovation than the previous 30-40 years combined.

I don't know about NASA, but he is right about how we went to space and the moon out of fear, and that space race was very much so a precursor for the computing revolution that began in the 80s. 

Long overdue for a new space pen.

Great music for sure.

So here we go with the same song and dance of "It's the people's fault.  Feel guilty and give up more tax dollars ok".

It's not the peoples fault.  Quit misusing tax dollars and laundering money for your own personal gain ok?

agentwhale007 wrote: oldpbnoob wrote:   I would venture a guess that private companies could do considerably more with less than 1/2 this amount of funding per year. But they don't, which is largely why NASA still exists.  Capitalism is awesome at a lot of things, but expanding knowledge and exploration for the sake of doing it is just not really one of those things.

Thats the problem with private funding. If theres no money to be made then the private sector will not do a mission.

My argument was whether someone could do the same with less, not whether it would be done.

I did some additional thinking on this. I know, scary. Shouldn't a better statement be "our dreams got crushed?" While I am not a rocket scientist or astro physicist, I am a minor space geek. I watch shows about whether warp drive propulsion, phasers, light speed travel, artificial gravity and other Star Trek fantasy is ever going to be a reality and most often it seems that on the big questions, the answer is "probably not." When we entered the space race, i would say most people were pretty ignorant, probably still true, about the possibilities of space travel and everyone thought we would be living on Mars by now and have the capability to travel to other galaxies maybe by the end of the century. I remember at the end of the Space Mountain ride at Disney World, back in the 70's and 80's,  there used to be an area sponsored by RCA that was called " The World of Tomorrow" IIRC that had us all living in space and driving jet cars and such. What a joke that seems now.

Edited by oldpbnoob - 12 March 2012 at 3:05pm