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NASA Policy Includes Mars, Moon Missions
TopSpin writes "The US House of Representatives passed a bill establishing NASA policy for the next two years. The bill is seen as an endorsement of President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration, including returning man to the Moon and eventually Mars. The House struggled with compromising other NASA initiatives against new manned exploration, eventually deciding to expand the budget enough to accommodate both prerogatives. The bill also endorses a servicing and repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope."
I also think NASA ought to prepare the american people by making it clear human lives will be lost in this endeavor. With the last two disasters (Columbia and Challenger) each time it setback their mission years. In an industry such as this people must be made to understand it's not an accident, rather a probability.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
So NASA is supposed to do all that in two years? or will the expenditures carry on until the next president has another "vision"?
What NASA does (or perhaps is forced to do) is waste money, because everybody knows none of these grandiose plans will ever occur. The Mars mission will be international or won't be at all, because there's no cold war to justify n-times the cost of sending some bozo to Mars where robots do just as well for cheaper.
So, like Slashdot just told me very accurately, nothing for you to see here, please move along.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
We can't return man there - that'd mean we were there to begin with.
.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
And, as we all know, the "Moon" is a ridiculous liberal myth.
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
Not programmes. If you pay for programmes, you get programmes, not results.
Seriously, this is basically how all successful exploration has proceeded in the past.
Deleted
Politics, indeed. Since this is only one of the hurdles in getting the budget NASA needs to fulfill the promises by this administration, I am still wary. Ill believe it when I see cold hard funding translated into actual projects.
There is truth in humor.
"The bill is seen as an endorsement of President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration, including returning man to the Moon and eventually Mars."
Returning man to the Moon is nothing but returning man to Mars is what I really look forward. You are a true visionary, Mr. President.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
I have to ask, why do we need to go back to the moon? Is there any real, scientific reason for it, or is it just our dear president trying to keep people's minds off other things with another moon mission?
If you live in America, how can you justify that statement? The whole reason you're here is because someone thought it would be a good idea to traverse dangerous terrain at considerable risk and expense and evidently, liked it enough to stay. (and yes I count native americans in that group as well. Walking across a land bridge in the sub-arctic couldn't have been easy or cheap.)
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Neither Mars nor the Moon were available to comment.
You can't handle the truth.
> Yes of course we could do it otherwise, but not as
> efficiently or as often
This is not the case. At all.
We don't go up from a gravity well, then down into another gravity well 390,000 km away, to a surface even less hospitable than low Earth orbit, and gain anything except higher fuel costs, more danger, and theed for even MORE hardware.
Most well-respected mission designs came to the conclusion a long time ago that the Moon wasn't a "stepping stone" to Mars, it was an unnecessary detour.
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
Nasa is by it's very nature too afraid to move on anything this quickly. To date, they've been too concerned with the possible loss of human life. if you look through history, america has made great progress riding on the corpses of great men who gaves their lives to the progress of success. Nasa should follow in these footsteps and begin launching rockets more often, with more emphasis on getting to the moon and staying there. Yes, i know i'm ripping on them, and they have done a lot. But oh well.
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Think? Yes
"Greatly increase the standard of living for the world's poor"
So would throwing huge ammounts of money/resources at the poor fix the problem? Tell me how to translate resources into "encouraging education and intelectual development, and tollerance", and I would agree that government funds such as these should be routed towards it.
Blind statements of "let's save the world first" are pretty ironic. Save the world from what? The world is what it is. We cannot create a utopia, becasue not everyone can agree on what that is. Yes, we can clean up our backyard, and *some* resources should go to that, but not all.
Manned space exploration is not something you do instead of cleaning up the situation, it is something you do in addition to. Programs such as this create the demand for the educated, because it is something that people WANT, and like to see.
Because you could completely remove NASA from the budget and the little piece of the budget you'd get wouldn't do a damn bit of good for the health-care, education, and economic systems. NASA doesn't take up that much of the federal budget, and most of the problems there are not a matter of money, but of dreadful mismanagement.
And there's probably more that can be done with space technolgies, STILL, than trying to explore the oceans for new life that we'll probably make extinct anyways.
Gentoo Sucks
If there is no extra money, and a long term cash commitment attached, then this is nothing but hot air. It is easy to SAY that we are going back into space, but it is only words untill they put the money where their words are.
NASA should simply send an unmanned probe to Mars containing a well-sealed, well-protected capsule containing a check for $1,000,000,[insert your favorite number of zeroes here], payable to bearer.
The first person who manages to get there and collect it gets to keep it.
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