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H.R. 3057: To the Asteroids, Moon and Mars
apsmith writes "Democrats have just introduced the Space Exploration Act of 2003 to the U.S. House of Representatives; the author is Nick Lampson of Texas, with 26 co-sponsors. The bill sets a vision and goals for the future of NASA, beyond the Low Earth Orbit of the Space Station and Shuttle, outlining a series of incremental steps for human spaceflight. These include development of reusable spacecraft for carrying people around in the Earth-Moon vicinity, including to the nearby Lagrange points; sending people to an Earth-crossing asteroid; establishing a lunar base, and sending people to Mars with a base on a Martian moon by 2024."
Olde News.
The future Governor of California documented a Mars base back in 1990. Truthfully, Michael, you really should do your research before accepting stories such as this.
Trolling is a art,
3rd!
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mmmm round and soft...
I heard Slashdot, Carmack, NASA, and the Government of China are teaming up to send men to Mars! Is this true?
To observe this Sept. 11, 2001, anniversary, I urge critics of Attorney General John Ashcroft - especially the Democratic presidential candidates - to read the article "The Falling Man" in the current Esquire.
A photo on page 176 shows the article's subject plunging headfirst from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Taken by celebrated Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, the picture was printed once in various newspapers - then banned by the U.S. media as too awful for public consumption.
The riveting article, by Tom Junod, chronicles the search to identify the "falling man," but the larger point for today, two years later, is that hundreds of people were driven by heat and smoke to leap to their deaths before the towers collapsed. The article is must-reading because - since the horror of the jumpers has been hushed up - it's a new wake-up call about the menace of terrorism.
Al Qaeda is still out there. Cells may be operating right here in the United States. Osama bin Laden still wants to wreak terror on America. Radical Islamicists have declared that using weapons of mass destruction to kill women and children is part of the holy duty of jihad.
As Bob Woodward reports in his book "Bush At War," President Bush's first order to Ashcroft after 9/11 was that his job no longer was to prosecute terrorists as criminals, but to prevent them from attacking America again. And that's what Ashcroft has tried to do - so far, successfully.
Yet, to listen to Ashcroft's critics, one would think he was a greater threat to American well-being than bin Laden or the terrorist leader's top planner, Ayman Al-Zawahiri.
The loudest of the critics is the Democrats' frontrunning candidate, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who has outrageously said that Ashcroft is the worst attorney general in American history, worse than Richard Nixon's AG, John Mitchell. "And he was a criminal," Dean noted.
Dean also declared that "John Ashcroft is not a patriot. John Ashcroft is a descendant of Joe McCarthy."
In the so-called Democratic presidential debates, does anyone besides Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) ever call Dean on the things he says? After all, Mitchell organized a burglary at Democratic National Committee headquarters and helped cover it up. McCarthy used anti-Communism to ruin lives and terrorize the entire U.S. political system.
Ashcroft doesn't begin to compare with either scoundrel. And, whatever limited infringements on civil liberties he has presided over, they don't begin to compare with those America has experienced in prior wars - Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus or Franklin Roosevelt's internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans for four years.
Instead of rebutting Dean's overstatements, his rivals are competing with him to ride a wave of Ashcroft-phobia raging semi-hysterically on the American left - and also, to some extent, on the right.
At the Congressional Black Caucus debate Tuesday night in Baltimore, Ashcroft's next-most vociferous critic, Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), said that "the last thing we need to do is turn our rights, our freedom and our liberties over to John Ashcroft."
Edwards also repeated the canard, spread by the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Library Association, that Ashcroft has FBI agents "going to our libraries and keeping records of the books we're checking out."
Under the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which Edwards voted for along with 97 other Senators, the government is entitled to search business records - and, yes, library records - in pursuit of potential terrorists. It takes a court order to do so, however, as it does in regular criminal cases. It's a fact that the 9/11 terrorists used computers at public libraries to communicate with one another. Does Edwards seriously think that the FBI is snooping into the check-out records of average citizens, when it fears an al Qaeda attack?
Dean and Edwards are in the lead, but all the Democratic candidates take routine swipes at Ashcr
...get them to legislate a cure for cancer.
I wonder if taxpayer's dollars emit x-rays as they fall into congressional back holes.
eyecon0meter technology.
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*eyecon0meterkode*
get more oxygen on your brain
consult with/trust in yOUR creator
seek out others of non-aggressive behaviours/intentions
stop wasting anything/acting frivoulously
pay attention (to yOUR environment, for example), as it leads to insights on planet/population protection/restoration
get ready to see the light
*/eyecon0meterkode*
you may use/copy/distribute the eyecon0meter kode without fear of reprisal/litigation.
this bill fills me with fear and horror
*chuckle*
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It is sad that you posted that anonymously. I hope that you look for replies as this was a well written post which merits discussion.
Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein are what happens when too much religion is mixed with big government. The govt. can watch you for "terrorist" activity, then eventually for illegal activity and eventually for immoral activity. Then people in that environment become even holier than thou. When they are used to flexing their authority on and repressing those around them they move onto other countries etc... John Ashcroft is step one in creating an American Bin Laden. He is the greatest enemy to our way of life ever encountered.
Ummm, basketball and football aren't the only sports available for men to play. At my university, we couldn't have a men's gymnastics team or volleyball team. And I went to a rather large public university (40,000 students). At smaller colleges with less funding, sports such as wrestling, soccer, and swimming get the axe. In my highschool, we had 200 guys sign a petition to get a men's vball team going, but the administration said they couldn't.
IANAL, but I play one on
the same democrats who claim we are wasting too much money on Iraq and not spending enough money on helping our citizens?
I don't know about you, but I sure could go for a good asteroid tour to help boast the economy.
I like the bit about "nearby Lagrange points." Wouldn't L1 and L5 be about 90 million miles away?
(Too lazy to look it up, I *assume* that the Lagrange points are the vertices of a hexagon inscribed in the planet's orbit, which is treated as circular for simplicity's sake. Since the circumference of a circle is 2*pi*R, and our R is 93mmi, and pi is a bit more than 3, that makes the circumferential distance a bit more than (2*3*93,000,000)/6 or R+epsilon. The straight-line distance (which wouldn't matter since spacecraft don't go in straight lines within a gravity well) is a chord which makes it a bit less, so I moosh all the estimates together and make it 90mmi. Simple!)
At the risk of losing karma points:
You, sir, are a jackass.
What France did was protest when the US governent lied to its people and invaded another nation under false pretenses.
Whether or not Saddam is a mean guy is inconsequential.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
What France did was protest when the US governent lied to its people and invaded another nation under false pretenses.
Alternative View: What France did was protest when the US governent [sic] invaded another nation that France was making a nice profit with by violating sanctions.
Well, you are full of shit. The French have been comfortably trading with Saddam and his band of thugs and they did not care for their arrangement to be disturbed. I don't doubt there are plenty of fine French citizens. I met several when I was visiting there. But their government is often quite cynical and opportunistic. How long has it been since they liberated any other country from tyranny?
You're both marvelously deluded. The whole point is not what France's motives were. Those, too, are beside the point. Just replace the word "France" with just about any other nation, and the statement is still true. Despite what you may think of Saddam, our government had to lie to its own people to get the internal backing to invade.
Of course, I realize that the average Republican stooge cares not that no WMD have been found, or that none of the promises they made to us before the war about how quick and decisive it would be, have come true. All they care about is the fact the "Bush kicked some Arab ass!" Woo hoo. This whole thing has turned into a revenge tragedy.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
I, myself, have a hybrid. It's the Honda Civic Hybrid and I love it. It has much better pickup than some gas powered cars do. I have had no problems, besides the fact that the power and engine useage gages are a bit distracting. Oh, this is a small thing, but when you stop the engine cuts turns off completely, therefore it is completely silent and without viboration. Since it has that big electric engine it starts the gas one fast, so that you don't notice any pause.
God, you're a moron and exceedingly proud of it. Anyone who rests his position on the lack of "evidence" of WMD is self-deluding of the worse kind. Why don't you interview some of the Kurdish survivors of his chemical attacks? Imbecile. He spent ten years perfecting his techniques of hiding his technology from UN inspectors. The whole apparatus can fit on two railway cars. The worse part of the whole affair is that self important bastards like you are protected from future attacks along with everyone else. If only you could be allowed to live in the sort of world that would result from your "wisdom" while the rest of us could watch from afar. We tried the limp-wrist Clinton approach and ended up with 9-11.
Gulf War just over a decade ago., when they helped liberate Kuwait. Not sure if there's been anything in between. Not sure whether they made a contribution towards Afghanistan. Not to be sneered at anyway.