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Pizza Hut's Space Program: First Launch
Legion303 writes: "This details the Pizza Hut-funded rocket that was sent up. Good first step in the privatization of spaceflight, although PH wouldn't have been my first choice of companies ..." The original plan was to be up last November, then last February, but better late than mis-delivered, I guess. Here's the original story hemos posted way back when. 500 million viewers is a lot of delivery business ...
Pizza Hut believes making great pizza is "rocket science"
... so that's why they haven't figured it out yet!
First of all, what has Pizza Hut REALLY done here that the government hasn't? The US has scraped up whole lot more than 2.5 million over the years.
But I see what you were trying to say, and in response to that I say, the only reason the government has "failed" is because its citizens don't care about space exploration anymore. Noone's really cared much about the space program since we landed on the moon. It's been over 30 years and we haven't attempted anything even close to that since. True, the trip to the moon served very little real purpose, but one would think we'd have done _something_ bigger than we've done by now. Alot of people today just think the space program is a waste of money. "We should be spending all of that money to fix problems here on Earth" they say. They just don't realize that ALOT of modern technology has come from NASA. Space-based experiments have saved lives and improved the quality of a whole lot of others, people just don't realize that at all. It's our responsibility to tell Uncle Sam where we want our money to go, and if NASA isn't getting the funding we all want it to, it's our own fault.
Secondly, I would like to point out that there is virtually nothing that ISN'T commercialized. There's only so much money the government can put up by itself. Can NASA hold patents? I don't know, but I would think if they could, they could be pulling in alot more money from licensing technologies, giving them a bit of return on investment. Maybe they already are, but I honestly have no idea. But anyways, look at railroads, cars, airplanes. All forms of transportation that may have been government subsidized, but still commercially driven. Space travel will join them. Bio-engineering, chemical engineering, etc. all areas of research that may be government subsidized, but again, are mainly commercially driven.
So, in the end, things will be fine. This isn't that dissimilar from what's happened many times before. In fact, I say it's about damn time. Commercialization=more rapid growth, and I'm all for rapid growth of the space program.
Large amounts of cash missing, grainy "photos" offered as proof that they ... um ... painted a miniscule logo on a rocket. Riiiiighiiit.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
One large Super Supreme for all Mankind. Hold the Onions.