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."

Comments

First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:First Post

[Spetiam]

AND we'll get to credit him with inventing space!

Re:First Post

[grammar fascist]

You clod. He took the initiative in inventing the space program.

Is there no one left with any reading comprehension?

Re:First Post

[DerekLyons]

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.

Private investors have been ponying up for space investments since the 60's - it's a myth of recent creation that such investment has only occurred with the X-prize and subsequently.

Me too!

[maxume]

I also support private exploration of space.

My guess is that this post will be just as effective as Gore in promoting investment.

He went on to add

[merc]

... 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".

I Mod Mr. Gore -1 Offtopic

[jmorris42]

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.

Re:Liberal vs. Conservative

[orcrist]

Not that I trust Mr. Gore to shrink the federal government.

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:

• Reduced the size of federal civilian workforce by 426,200 positions between January 1993 and September 2000...The government workforce was for the first time the smallest it had been since the Eisenhower Administration.
• Closed nearly 2,000 obsolete field offices and eliminated 250 programs and agencies, like the Tea-Tasters Board, the Bureau of Mines, and wool and mohair subsidies.
• Procurement reform led to the expanded use of credit cards for small item purchases, saving about $250 million a year in processing costs.

source: http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/npr/whoweare/append ixf.html

Not that the mainstream "liberal" media covered this. sigh.

Re:Liberal vs. Conservative

[Anonymous Coward]

It didn't get covered because most of those were pushed through by a Republican congress.
  Ooops. Truth bites again.

Re:Space Case?

[phantomlord]

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.

Re:Liberal vs. Conservative

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:Liberal vs. Conservative

[b17bmbr]

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?

Has to be said

[GorgarWillEatYou]

The former U.S. Vice President said his personal cause is to change the public's mind about "this planet crisis" to make it a top priority. The term "crisis" in Chinese is represented by two symbols together, he advised. "The first means danger...the second means opportunity," Gore said.

I call it crisitunity

Re:Real Al Gore quote kiddies...

[Keebler71]

Actually - I've found it a pretty weak debunking. While it is true that he never said he "invented" the internet, he did say he "took the initiative in creating the internet". While his congressional record is noteworthy on funding the early net, he was clearly trying to imply that he "created" the internet.

I am detecting a pattern here though... Al Gore seems to find a good idea in progress, champion it, and (at least awkwardly) take some type of credit for it... in this case he is a bit behind the X-prize foundation and NASA with its COTS Program and Centennial Challenges. (I'll leave out his recent championing of Global Warming since he has a pretty well established environmental record)

Re:Space Case?

[Quadraginta]

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.

Re:Gore needs to pick sides

[skadacl]

Is Gore really encouraging "fouling the air with lots of space launches"? Or could one of the overriding goals of privatization be the development of more economically feasible, and environmentally friendly space technology? The status-quo sure isn't working out for the best... so lets just think about it. The internet for example, did not just expand with more and more people using out-dated technology--but rather, with more people, internet and computer technology has grown leaps and bounds while drastically decreasing in cost.

Re:Real Al Gore quote kiddies...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually - I've found it a pretty weak debunking. While it is true that he never said he "invented" the internet, he did say he "took the initiative in creating the internet". While his congressional record is noteworthy on funding the early net, he was clearly trying to imply that he "created" the internet.

Funding the early net? That is an oversimplification of the facts and history of his involvement. The process of privatizing and building a national information infrastructure requires all kinds of government involvement (understandably). It especially requires someone to champion the idea to other members of government.

All of the people involved with the evolution of the internet were important. Not just the Kahn and Cerf and the techies. It took a lot of people in a lot of different areas in order to evolve the way it did. It took Dennis Jennings and Steve Wolff at NSFNET (who helped NSFNET to make the decision on using TCP/IP and the infrastructure of DARPANET). It took a huge list of great contributors for it to come about as it did. In the realm of government (a crucial component to the NSFNET's policies and goals), it was Al Gore who was it's greatest contributor.

The "internet" of the 1980's was mostly a collection of regional, small "nets". Many of them were purpose built and were incompatible with one another. NSFNET decided to use TCP/IP in 1985 (many thanks to Dennis Jennings for championing its use!). In 1986 Steve Wolff took over NSF and immediately saw the need for a wide area networking infrastructure. They took on DARPANET's internet infrastructure to encourage interoperability and scalability. The NSF then encouraged its regional (initially academic) networks of the NSFNET to seek commercial, non-academic customers, expand their facilities to serve them, and exploit the resulting economies of scale to lower costs. However, use of their backbone was limited only to use "in support of Research and Education". This is why you saw so very many "*NET"'s (PSI, UUNET etc). In 1988, they initiated a bunch of conferences in which they worked out this plan to privatize and commercialize the internet.

The NRC produced a report commissioned by NSF titled "Towards a National Research Network" and presented it to Gore in 1988. This report had a profound effect on Gore, who took great interest in the subject and, became a champion of the cause.

In 1991, he promoted legislation that would provide $600M dollars for high performance computing and for the creation of the National Research and Education Network. The NREN brought together industry, academia and government in a joint effort to accelerate the development and deployment of gigabit/sec networking. Also brought about by the bill was the NII (National Information Infrastructure), i.e. the "information superhighway". As a side note, the bill also wound up funding the development of MOSAIC.

In 1992, we all got sick of the term "information superhighway" during the 1992 election season (perhaps foreshadowing another oft-repeated phrase used by Gore during the 2000 election season, "lock-box" ;).

In 1993, Clinton and Gore submitted a report entitled "Technology for America's Economic Growth". Gore championed and expanded these ideas in speeches that he made at UCLA and to the Telecommunications Union in 1994. In addition, he "became the first U.S. vice president to hold a live interactive news conference on an international computer network".

Also in 1994, an NRC report, entitled "Realizing The Information Future: The Internet and Beyond" was released. This report, commissioned by NSF, was the document in which a blueprint for the evolution of the information superhighway was articulated and which has had a lasting affect on the way to think about its evolution. It anticipated the critical issues of intellectual property rights, ethics, pricing, education, architecture and regulation for the Internet.

In 1995, NSF's privatization policy culminated with the defunding of the NS

An inconvenient truth....

[Half-pint HAL]

Accelerating a large chunk of metal to its escape velocity releases a massive volume of greenhouse gas.

HAL