Slashdot Mirror
NASA Turns 50
phobos13013 writes "Fifty years ago yesterday, in 1958, President Eisenhower signed the United States Public Law 85-568, National Aeronautics and Space Act to create NASA. In the fifty years since its creation, NASA has made manned missions landing on the Moon, put a space station in orbit, launched numerous unmanned missions to the Moon, Mars, the solar system, and beyond, as well as launching reusable manned spacecraft in orbit. Some of the failures included the loss of two manned spacecraft and their crews as well as the loss of the Apollo 1 crew during a training mission. Although the future of the organization is in question, Americans, and the world, are looking forward to another fifty years of progress including a return trip to the Moon and an eventual manned mission to Mars."
i ve seen the space shuttle ass hole it definetly landed on the moon do some research...
Actually it was the Apollo Lunar Lander which landed on the Moon, after being launched with a Saturn V rocket.
It's a classic xkcd strip: http://xkcd.com/202
Indeed. -1 Troll! Geez, I thought you guys would get it...
That's a halucination caused by so called flouridization of the water driven by a military industrial complex conspiracy to exploit the common man and subvert democracy for the establishment of a new world through globalisation and unilateral foreign poli...
Wait, sorry, it is a moon. My bad.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
50 years, and we are still stuck in low Earth orbit. 50 years, and still no cost-effective launch system.
If all goes well, we'll have one this weekend:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Upcoming_launches
Annual US war budget: $480Bn USD
NASA US Annual budget: equal to about 1 day of war budget.
The current administration has zero interest in funding anything to do with studying climate change, particularly a satellite first proposed by Al Gore.
It was built, but never launched. It now sits in storage (at a cost of $1M/year), awaiting a less hostile administration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triana_(satellite)
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
What is the return on the American investment here?
Here is a breakdown by state and here is just some of the technology that has come out of NASA.
All the Trillions of dollars the American tax payer has sent to NASA over the years.
What trillions? The total amount spent on NASA since its inception in 1958 is $592 billion. We spend that much every year on our military.