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Gore Pushes for Private Investment in Space
dptalia writes "Al Gore said in a recent speech that more private enterprises need to invest in space. Gore pointed to the successful growth of the internet as proof that private investment is faster than government. Not surprisingly, Gore also lambasted President Bush's space policy."
I have to agree with him. Private investment in space is the only thing that will change it from a huge, shiny waste of tons of money to a useful endeavor.
Al Gore saw the business potential. He never claimed to actually have invented it. Vint Cert is a pretty good reference.
Quack, quack.
I also support private exploration of space.
My guess is that this post will be just as effective as Gore in promoting investment.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
... that the dangers we face from ManBearPig are only exacerbated by a lack of private investment in space. He concluded his speech by asserting that he was quite "serial".
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Ok, somewhere in there is a pitch for somebody to do something in space, but I'm damned if I can find it amongst the whinging about global warming and Bush Derangement Syndrome filling most of the wordcount.
The problem is Gore was speaking at an X-Prize function and the article is at space.com so they had to either spin some message about space out his drivel or write an article tearing him a new one for misuse of the speaking slot. Being good Democrats they opted for #1.
Yes space is good, private industry should, and is, working on the problems. Gore and government are no longer needed, and in fact only slow things down.
Democrat delenda est
Why not? He already did more to shrink the federal government as Clintons VP than any of these lip-service Republicans since they've been in power:
source: http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/whoweare/appen
Not that the mainstream "liberal" media covered this. sigh.
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
Good thing we didn't elect him in 2000 then, or else he would run up record budget and trade deficits with his liberal spending.
Gas would be $3/gal under Gore due to his taxed on the oil companies, while cutting taxes for his liberal Hollywood buddies. He would cut student loans and military hazard pay (students and soldiers emit CO2). He would starve science, education, and research investment of this country.
There would be massive unemployment because all the jobs would be outsourced to non-Kyoto countries like India and China; our Big-Three automakers would lay off millions and post record losses under Gore!
What's more, somewhere around August 2001 he would go to his forest to clear some bear-traps, all the while ignoring a PDB titled "Bin laden determined to attack American ozone using planes", which would have led to a great tragedy perhaps a month later... Which Gore would exploit to roll back civil liberties, torture random people suspected of driving an SUV, and even rolling back Habeas Corpus (or else the Global Warmists would win!).
Finally, Al Gore would probably invade some crazy country because Gore they were hiding the Weapons of Mass Polution
Good thing Gore was not elected, eh?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
It didn't get covered because most of those were pushed through by a Republican congress.
Ooops. Truth bites again.
Maybe I'm reading a different summary and article than you did, but I don't see a reference to that misquote anywhere other than in your comment. Might want to have a neurologist look at that knee-jerk you're developing...
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
You know what this means. In years to come people will say that Al Gore invented commercial space travel. Of course we'll tell our kids that really all he did was use his position of power and influence as a means to assist in its growth. ;)
We still face problems of undereducation
Throwing more money at it won't fix the problem. We've spent hundreds of billions in new funds on top of what we were going to spend in the last 15 years and test scores are virtually unchanged. It is a social problem caused mostly by parents who don't care.
unemployment
What are we supposed to do, write everyone who gets fired a check for a million bucks? I know a LOT of people who've gotten fired and layed off and they wait until their benefits are about to run out before they start a serious crunch of a new job. Besides, we're at 4-5% unemployment, not 20%, there are MUCH bigger economic problems to worry about than that.
civil unrest
Yeah... everyone is rioting in the streets right now. There is always going to be a certain level of civil unhappiness, you can't eliminate it all without eliminating humanity.
disease
Cure every disease out there and watch another even nastier one creep up.
starvation
Generally not a major issue in the US. If you want the US to solve the starvation problems in the world, just let me know when you want to start overthrowing every 3rd world despot out there with our military. The problem isn't lack of food, it's lack of distribution.
international strife
See civil unrest... only there are very few bonds tying us together as an international community. There can never be perfect international harmony because somewhere out there, there will be at least one person who isn't happy and wants to lead a rebellion to overthrow it.
You have a low uid so I'm assuming you're not 15. I'm sorry that you still live in this happy little utopia where you get visted by Santa and the Tooth Fairy but the real world doesn't work the way you want it to and it never will. There will never be perfect harmony and happiness because each human is an individual with their own desires and viewpoint. With more than six billion people on the Earth, you're never going to get all of them to agreee on any single issue, much less the big picture.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
Well, at least he would've done one thing right!
Legalize it.
if 40% of our income wasn't stolen by the gov't each year.
"The reality is..."
Well, as a fiscal conservative, I happend to like having a budget surplus, smaller government, negative national debt accumulation and a reduced deficit in addition enjoying record economic growth and the the largest real and relative redistribution of wealth in recorded U.S. history. Far from perfect, but the 90s had things headed in the right direction, economically speaking.
That it all happened under the watch of a democrat should tell you all you need to know about the utility of political labels, as well as the fact that by any measure, this is the LEAST conservative administration in decades.
which is exactly why I don't understand the liberal love fest for clinton. he signed welfare reform and balanced budgets and yes, cut government. sure it took divided goverment, but still, the current occupant the white house has been a huge disappointment. of course, he never claimed to be a reagan/goldwater disciple and he sure has been anything but. clinton was more a moderate republican than democrat. it's hell for libertarians like me. what the hell ever happened to Article 1, Section 8?
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
This is old news. NASA Adminstrator Mike Griffin is using half a billion dollars to invest in private industry to spark this.
Um - hello? How exactly is spending tax money "private investment"?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
First he paints a doomsday scenario if we don't cut our greenhouse emmissions, now he's encouraging fouling the air with lots of space launches. On a per-event basis, perhaps nothing fouls up the air (especially upper atmosphere) as fast as a space launch. The only mitigating factor is that there are so few. If there were a hundred times as many launches as we have today we'd probably see significant environmental impact.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
will this really do anything to solve any of the problems we currently have?
No. But the difference between the problem of getting men to Mars and the "problems" you mention -- and you could just as well have added the "problems" of the inevitability of death, taxes, and bad luck -- is that the former can actually be solved.
I think space exploration is a worthwhile endeavor, but AFTER we make life a little better for the next generation.
Some of us feel that space exploration is how we make life better for the next generation. We leave them a more exciting future, a new frontier to conquer, new adventures to motive them, and new technology to serve them. We tend to feel that throwing vast amounts of time and money down various rat-holes, by trying to "solve" insoluble problems that have been with us unchanged since the birth of Christ is much like the ancient Egyptians building enormous pyramids to please nonexistent gods -- a foolish and futile waste of our childrens' inheritance.
I've always found it annoying whenever someone goes on about how the exploitation of space should be shifted TO private industry, but doesn't mention who it is that it should be shifted FROM. NASA isn't the one exploiting space, NASA doesn't even design most of the hardware being used in space.
Almost all of the design and so forth are done not by NASA, but by NASA's private contractors. NASA acts as a funnel, pouring hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes into the high-tech research departments of thousands of corporations.
Think of it this way: Did NASA design or build the space shuttle? No; it was mostly Lockheed-Martin-Marietta, Boeing and Rockwell. What about Hubble, did NASA design or build it? No; Lockheed, Perkin-Elmer and Ball did most of the work, and the same goes for nearly every other "governmental" space project. While NASA personnel are often crucial, most of what NASA provides is inspiration and funding.
If any of NASA's thousands of contractors and subcontractors wanted to exploit space, nothing would stop them. Funding? They have trillions of dollars altogether. Intellectual property? They already have working designs, and all of NASA's work is in the public domain. Laws? Aside from military/warlike projects and a few environmental restrictions, you can launch anything you want into space.
In other words, NASA already IS (and always has been) little more than the sort of "collaboration with private industry" that the media and thinktanks are supposedly pushing for it to become.
Since all this is so, where DID this B.S. push for "private" space exploitation and a scaling down of NASA come from? The only logical conclusion is a hit job, not just on NASA, but on space science as a whole. An attempt to cut down on one of the last few big government endowments that actually accomplishes anything more than producing pork (not to mention creating dangerously disruptive new technologies like the microcomputer you're reading this on.) I would imagine the most likely sources of this garbage to be some (unrelated) combination of the "defense" industry -probably NASA's biggest enemy- and anti-government neanderthal libertarians.
Note that I wouldn't put Gore in this category, as he probably only bought into it due to its buzzwordyness.
Eric,
Accelerating a large chunk of metal to its escape velocity releases a massive volume of greenhouse gas.
HAL
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Actually,when I think of Al Gore I don't think of the typical rants. I think of the PMRC. If you recall, Tipper (Al's wife) was a founding member. From wikipedia, "The mothers claimed that popular music, especially rock music, was partially responsible for the (at the time) recent increase in rape, teenage pregnancy, and teen suicide.". Umm...considering how many slashdotters are gung ho about private rights not being revoked I'm surprised more people don't mention this.
Now, these people also testified before the Senate...in which Al was a member of at the time. You can't tell me he did not use some of his political clout to give his wife's new special interest group...which sought to label, categorize lyrics as harmful and make it difficult to purchase (Bully,Grand Theft Auto anyone?).
I'm guessing you think that one solution fits all problems. You're criticism is very naive. First, there is never one broad sweeping solution to fit all problems. Second, the two problems/issues are very different in fundemental ways. Space exploration is technology driven. By privitizing space exploration, business will drive the advances in technology necessary to get us there. Healthcare and social security are not technology driven (at least where the problem with them is). The problem with these is the their system. Since social security and healthcare are a right (or at least should be) of all citizens, the payout needs to be equal (pretty much socialist) in order to guarantee these rights. By privitizing it, the capitalism will show its ugly side by make a few rich while screwing over many. The purpose of social security is to equally benefit all, not turn a profit for some. Government regulation and some sort of universal healthcare is a much better solution than privatizing. Plus, most of the poor (who really need social security) are generally not savvy investors. These are the people that will invest their social security in real-estate because they heard from someone that the market is hot and an infomercial at 4 am talked about how profitable flipping houses is. (for the uninformed, the real-estate bubble burst a year ago, but it is not until now that joe sixpack is hearing about it)
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson