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Obama's Space Plan — a Conservative Argument
MarkWhittington writes "The Obama space proposal, which seeks to enable a commercial space industry for transportation to and from low Earth orbit while it cancels space exploration beyond LEO, has sparked a kind of civil war among conservatives. Some conservatives hate the proposal because of the retreat from the high frontier and even go so far as to cast doubt on the commercial space aspects. Other conservatives like the commercial space part of the Obama policy and tend to gloss over the cancellation of space exploration or even denigrate the Constellation program as 'unworkable' or 'unsustainable.'"
Conservatives are not opposed to federal spending when it is in the geo-political interest of the nation as whole. Eisenhower kicked off the federal highway system. Republicans and conservative Democrats came through with money for Apollo. Richard Nixon, actually, Caspar Weinburger, kept the space shuttle alive, and none other than Dan Quayle intervened to keep the Space Station and Space Shuttle going when Bush the Elder proposed cutting it.
The issue with federal spending is usually around entitlements, which are a different argument that I don't want to start here.
But...
The way I read the whole killing of manned space flight is that there has been, even dating back to Apollo, this idea in liberal camps that we should not be spending any money on things like space or defense, or even roads, for that matter. Instead, the federal government in their eyes should not do anything until every poor person is somehow fixed. Walter Mondale made this argument in the 1960s, and Barrack Obama made this argument elliptically during his campaign. There's not a talk of the "private sector" building into space. There's no economic benefit immediately of sending a man to explore Mars or the Moon or an Asteroid. It's a national project with payoffs in intangibles that are hard to even forsee. But it is one of those things the country must do, and keep getting better at, to get ahead.
But the fact is, space exploration is dead in this administration. It just is. Democrats aren't pro-science. They are a pro-poor party these days. Exploration, as the government would do it, in the tradition of Columbus and Cook and Shepard and Armstrong, is now dead to Democrats. Once again, conservatives have to pick up the torch, because the left is so fixated on redistribution of wealth that it has forgotten how to manage a nation as a whole. You can't stop exploration to ensure that every idiot has a slice of bread.
Sometimes people have to be left behind, and that's what this is about.
This is my sig.
I guess the US will be exporting space exploration to China now as well.
Without an active maned launch program I fear the United States will quickly loose our position of technical and scientific leadership. Already we have slipped to 9th in the world for science and technology education. If they money were to be invested in higher education I would be less worried but seeing as my tuition went up after North Carolina instituded a "education" lottery, well things just don't look good.
Some conservatives hate the proposal because of the retreat from the high frontier and even go so far as to cast doubt on the commercial space aspects.
Uh, no- all congresscritters hate it because NASA is giant cash-cow for the defense industry- companies like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing. Hell hath no fury like a congresscritter who wants to stand on a platform in front of a defense factory in his or her district, come election time, and talk about how important the makers of the A43 Latrine Servicing Truck are to the defense and security of our great nation.
All those probes, satellites, etc? Built by defense contractors, carried up on rockets built by defense contractors, and very often launched from launch facilities owned by defense contractors.
The shuttle costs half a billion dollars per launch, for example...and almost everything NASA does is outsourced to government contractors.
Please help metamoderate.
If conservatives want to have a civil war over the space program, then fine. The simple fact is that the new space program is the most rational allocation of the woefully inadequate NASA funds that politicians are willing to throw at them. Nothing more, nothing less.
As a NASA engineer, I agree that it is a shame we are shutting down all our manned launch programs for the time being, but completing the Ares project would have meant shuttering just about every other research & development effort. NASA's most valuable resource is their innovative scientists and engineers--it really is a waste to have most of NASA's budget going to routine space flight tasks.
The new budget cuts manned launches but redirects those funds to long-term research that will make future manned launches both more productive and less expensive. Extensive research into propulsion, navigation, life support, and self-sustainability will be carried out using inexpensive robotic missions and the International Space Station.
If the Republicans want someone to blame, then they should blame nearly every politician since the end of the Cold War for not pushing for more NASA funding and relevant priorities. And no, pork barrel projects don't count, only money that can be distributed based on scientific merit and technological feasibility really makes a difference.
The bottom line is the political climate makes it impossible to properly fund anything, including space travel. If you want to change that, tell your congresspeople to increase funding and support the scientific priorities--not pork projects--we need to make real and tangible progress in the quest to explore the universe
I always love debates on the space program. Lots of big ideas, but what is missing is leadership. What made NASA so successful in the 1960s and 1970s was that there was a clear objective: put a man on the moon. Build a reusable launch system. Put up a space station. The problem is that there are no real national goals with space, so it is exceedingly difficult to sell, say a heavy launch vehicle. Put some goals in, and suddenly money becomes easy because people buy into the grand plan. Say the goal is to put a permanent colony on the moon - or to put a man on Mars. Suddenly there is context and justification for spending, inventions to invent, and what is science suddenly turns into applied science.
Our politicians need to lead, not look for the people to lead them when it comes to space. An ambitious space program is just what is needed.
-- $G
Remember where your Trillions in recovery came from, the US people are now long term paying for the Chinese Space Program.
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well that's one thing where, even though I'd say I'm mostly libertarian, I'd disagree. getting infrastructure in place is one of the things that government can do easier and (if you can eliminate most of the pork and other bureaucratic shit) should be doing since it is one thing that most definitely does benefit all citizens equally, just imagine if the roads were done by private companies, there might be more that are very well maintained but something like the interstate highway system would be near impossible to create because you'd be so hard pressed to get the companies to actually cooperate in any reasonable manner. Funding NASA helps fund the research and development that allows for the possibility of creating that infrastructure we so desperately need up in space in order to do any of it. There are so few people that seem to realize that we are so incredibly far away from being able to mine the asteroid belts and things like that. And even so many years after the space program has started, there is not one company that can go into LEO to do the things NASA can do, simply because the returns aren't there in LEO to be profitable in the short or even medium term. Government does not have any business in morality but infrastructure is one place that it can really do a huge amount of good for the citizens and possibly the world (and our own economy if we get the infrastructure up there and charge others to use it)
No two ways about it. The shuttle is on its last legs, Orion/Ares is mis-begotten, and anyone who thinks that private enterprise can deliver a man-rated system in the near future is delusional.
Give it up...we're in this position because of lack of intelligent investment over the Clinton and Bush administrations.
NASA is one example of where government can pool together resources to achieve national objectives the private sector would not do.
Consider the history of flight: the government wasted money on Langley, and he had all the right connections and credentials. He failed. Who got us off the ground? The Wrights, Glenn Curtis, Alberto Santos-Dumont, and thousands of others who risked their own life, money, and work. Why did Lindbergh fly the Atlantic? There was a prize for it, posted by a consortium of private parties.
The government spent a shitload of tax money on beating the Russians to the moon, so we'll never know what the private sector would have done to develop a near-earth launch capability, or maybe to go to the moon for something like the x-prize.
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
They're the ones cheering at the cancellation of Pork In Space.
I'd certainly like to see a viable human spaceflight program, building our way out to Luna, Mars, and beyond. Problem is, Constellation wasn't it. Constellation was treated as an excuse to pay aerospace giants megatons of money to develop a new launcher which would - at best - just barely achieve its aims. NASA appears to no longer be capable of serious launcher development, because the industry lobbyists own the politicians, and the politicians own the engineers specifying how the industry's products must perform. I am dead certain NASA engineers can do fine, fine work, but they haven't been free to do what they do best.
With the new approach, this counterproductive cycle is at least interrupted and hopefully broken.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Getting private industry into the act is a good thing, in my opinion, although I'm not so sanguine about government subsidies.
Like the nuclear industry, who do you think is going to end up insuring private space flight?
Getting rid of government subsidies isn't nearly as easy as we'd like to think.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
What private company do you expect to fund the GPL and send probes to the outer solar system? Or Hubble, for that matter?
Yes, reasonable people can argue that LEO launches are so routine these days that they should be turned over to private industry. Fine. But there are tons of other NASA programs that have no profit potential whatsoever, yet tremendously enrich humanity culturally and scientifically. Because private industry would never fund these programs, NASA must. And we're better off for it.
Some conservatives hate the proposal because of the retreat from the high frontier and even go so far as to cast doubt on the commercial space aspects.
They complain one day about out of control government spending, so when Obama cuts an expensive program that isn't working, they complain about that. Those fiscal conservatives in the Alabama congressional delegation are having a collective heart attack trying to hang on to their pork projects.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Libertarian -- and therefore idiot. You mayn't be an idiot, of course, but you're just parroting idiot arguments. You're not sanguine about government subsidies, but you think getting private industry into the act is a good thing. Right: how the hell do you think private industry is going to get into it, without the last 100 years of government research into how it's done and how you build the tools to do it, and the currently proposed subsidies for getting there? Private industry on its own wouldn't touch space with a barge-pole, not now and not in the next thousand years.
My dear libertarian friend, please realise that government isn't evil, it's a necessity and basically a good thing. Without it we'd have anarchy -- like Somalia. Nobody wants to see levels of control like in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, but that's why we work to make it better, not to get rid of it.
Mod this parent up. U.S. industry is loathe to spend money on any R&D that does not have an immediate return on investment (read:shareholder gains). That is why there are not now and never will be manned private launchers entirely from the so-called 'private sector'. Too expensive for too little return. This new plan from the Obama administration doesn't change that one bit. The U.S. Treasury will still be spending the money to design and build a man-rated launcher. Instead of ATK, Lockheed, Boeing, etc. being the recipients of this largesse, it will now be SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, and others. Basically, the money has been diverted from large government contractors that have already been in the space business for a long time, to a bunch of newcomers. Same game, different players.
I thought conservatives had basic grammar skills. Gut TARP, kill the agricultural subsidies and get the fuck out of Iraq and you'll free up enough funding to get us to Mars.
Going back to the moon on chemical rockets was a stupid idea. If we had a better technology that allowed, say, a permanent base with a hundred people, it might be worth doing. But just repeating Apollo is pointless.
Worse, it would probably fail. Apollo had top people, including many experienced aircraft engineers who'd designed many successful aircraft, and, of course, the best German rocket engineers. That pool of people is gone. As Ben Rich, once head of Lockheed's "Skunk Works" (SR-71, stealth aircraft, etc.), wrote, "I worked on 22 airplanes in my career. Today's engineer is lucky to work on one."
The other priority should be a campaign to combat superstition and promote naturalistic views of the world. Turn on TV you get talk shows promoting psychics and alternative medicines. Open up a phone book and it's full of Chiropractors and Acupuncturists.
How can you expect to make an investment in sciences and develop a sound technological basis for the future of mankind when only 40% of the population believes in a naturalistic explanation of it's own existence?
This is exactly why the country has become so polarized as of late: rather than simply disagreeing with the viewpoints of others and then discussing ways to find common ground, people who hold to strict left- or right-wing tenets simply dismiss members of the opposition as being "lunatics" and having "pernicious" ideas.
This has the short-term benefit of not having to address real problems with one's favored agenda (e.g., trying to provide health care for everyone or trying to overthrow unfavorable foreign regimes when the country is up to its eyeballs in debt). But in the long run, it means that nothing gets done, and those things that *do* get done are ill-conceived and generally rife with provisions that will cause more problems than they solve.
In other words, come back when you're done with your whiny ad hominem talking points. Then we can talk actual issues.
It was designed by Lockheed Martin.
I don't know the specifics of this case, but if it was designed by Lockheed Martin on a government contract, that's not an indication that it would have been feasible to do so in the private sector.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Libertarians are often ignorant of the fact that they effectively lobby against civilization. In terms of GDP per capita, life expectancy, innovation, and quality of life, the middle of the road socialist countries dominate worldwide. That's because if you shackle your society with continuous relearning of generational lessons, you can never move beyond basic progress.
If you'd like to refute the massive progress introduced by the Apollo program in the sixties, go ahead and make your case for a private corporation in the same time frame spending a good portion of the US GDP for pure research. Bell Labs is the only thing that even comes close.
A world of self regulation is just as absurd as a world with complete government control of production. Use the market for easily duplicated services that are not necessary. For everything else, try and use your brain. Mindless idealism nets nothing of value.
Summarized in economic terms by Adam Smith:
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.
Who also believed
The legal rate... ought not be much above the lowest market rate. If the legal rate of interest in Great Britain, for example, was fixed so high as eight or ten per cent, the greater part of the money which was to be lent would be lent to prodigals and projectors [promoters of fraudulent schemes], who alone would be willing to give this high interest.A great part of the capital of the country would thus be kept out of the hands which were most likely to make a profitable and advantageous use of it, and thrown into those which were most likely to waste and destroy it.
When the legal rate of interest, on the contrary is fixed but a very little above the lowest market rate, sober people are universally preferred, as borrowers, to prodigals and projectors. The person who lends money gets nearly as much interest from the former as he dares to take from the latter, and his money is much safer in the hands of the one set of people than in those of the other. A great part of the capital of the country is thus thrown in the hands in which it is most likely to be employed with advantage.
(from naked capitalism)
GDP Per Capita
Life Expectancy
Quality of Life
OK ... here's my problem. It's OK, to say that morally the government should not do this. It's OK to say that private industry would do a better job. What bothers me is saying these two things right next to each other as if they were logically equivalent.
I'm not saying you're doing this here, it's just that these two kinds of positions are so often marshaled with each other without comment that I think it's important to note that one does not necessarily follow from the other. It might be morally wrong for the government to explore space, AND that government space exploration is the only practical way to get that done.
I think the call for private industry to step up to the plate with LEO is smart. From a pragmatic standpoint if this is not th time to do it, it's at least pretty close. But if we imagined a history without any government support of space exploration, I don't think we'd be at this point today. That alternate history might be more morally defensible, but nature and economics aren't obligated to give us a happy ending when we make the "right" choices.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The other priority should be a campaign to combat superstition and promote naturalistic views of the world.
Uhm... no. The US government should not be in the business of propaganda (for whatever the reason). The idea is good - but many ideas with good intentions (like this) ends up really bad.
PS, there are a lot of other silliness that people should stop. One example of this is 30+ guys dressed up like nancies in kevlar suits chasing an eggy-ball while 50,000 people have nothing better to do than to watch them chase the eggy ball. WTF?
What happens between a man and his TV is their business.
Yes, please ignore the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the war industry.
And hey, let's throw out every social service program and see how our society looks when kids are starving in the streets. I get fucking ill every time some blowhard claims to be patriotic while they lobby to throw their countrymen in the street so they can continue to have their war toys.
How about we just return tax levels - literally 4 to 5 points higher at incomes above 90,000 a year - to the Clinton days, and balance the budget that way? Or, end the war tourism programs that are actually draining the treasury, and have been for fifty years.
"Can we please stop wasting our time and giving attention to these right-wing lunatics and their pernicious ideas?"
You mean, conservatives like this man? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson
If you don't place a premium on things like individual liberty, limited government, fiscal responsibility, etc., then as you mentioned, there are plenty of places on this earth where you can move. Making the criticism that the GOP doesn't stand for these things is fair. Making the claim that conservatives don't stand for these things is bullshit. You shouldn't confuse big-R Republicans with little-r republicans. This country was established as a democratic republic, with most of the power spread across regional governments, and if you don't like it, you are free to leave. If you can't see the wisdom of a weak central government and most power concentrated at the local level, then you clearly slept through the 20th century. If you want to give all of your money away to the poor, you're also free to do that, but I rarely see liberals putting their money where their mouth is. It's called "charity." As for me, I feel that doing all of my charitable giving through the U.S. Government is an extremely inefficient way to get money into the hands of the people who need it most.
The Founding Fathers warned us about things like crippling public debt and getting involved in foreign adventures. We ignored them, and now look where we are. We can't even get serious about staying dominant in manned low-earth orbit spaceflight. I personally would rather see my money go towards expanding our knowledge of the universe and humanity's dreams than continually showered upon those in society who contribute the least.
You realize Boeing and ULA (a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed) are two of the primary contractors under CCDev, the precursor to a larger 'commercial' manned operation. Furthermore, SpaceX, Blue Origin, et. al. employ a large number of people who used to work at more traditional companies -- Boeing and Lockheed do not have experience, the people working for them do.
The difference in the game isn't that the money is going to different people, its how its being managed. Before, we were operating in the same way we did in Apollo, by telling companies what we wanted built, and paying significantly more when things didn't work out as cheaply as we hoped. This made sense in the 60s, since we didn't really know what it took to complete the task. However, after we have been launching people into orbit for 50 years, we should no longer be able to claim to not be able to predict the costs. So the difference here is that instead of funding development of vehicles, NASA is instead saying they'll be a guaranteed customer, and purchase rides at a fixed price from these companies. While this may seem like a fine distinction, it changes the incentive structure significantly so that programs are more likely to stay on time and on budget, proposals are more likely to be accurate, and congress is less able to meddle.
Costs for missions beyond LEO are harder to predict, so government directed cost-plus contracts may make sense in this regime -- however, they will be far more successful if there is a robust, reliable, multi-vendor infrastructure for getting people to and from LEO.
You're confusing individual liberty with social justice.
It's not possible to enjoy personal liberty when you are worked to the bone, discarded at a whim, and can't afford medical care for your children. It's not possible to appreciate persona liberty when you're not educated, and it's not possible to rise out of those circumstances when economic opportunity is inherited. Without regulation, capitalism reverts to its natural state: liberty for the very wealthy and feudalism for everyone else, and Republicans have opposed regulation of markets for over a century.
If you really care about maximizing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, you'll support policies that give everyone a chance to achieve these things. In the process, you'll be amazed by how much people "contribute" in return.
See, the conservative mindset is that lack of success is a moral failure on the part of the failed. If someone is down on his luck, he must have done something wrong, and therefore must be punished. It's really a modern breed of Calvinism, the religion tenant that God has pre-destinated certain people for heaven and others for hell, and that he demonstrates His grace toward the chosen by handing them with worldly success.
It's a wicked, wicked idea. Society should be built around the idea of helping everyone succeed, not rewarding an arbitrarily-chosen lucky few while punishing everyone else for things that aren't their fault.
"Whatever is, is right" is an evil idea.
And veterans get an extra 57 billion. Welfare at least has a purpose to it. Have you looked at the feasibility of cutting these programs? You seem to have just cut a % you felt was good from each program without delving into them.
Cutting 20% from disability when you already don't have a health care system in place sentences a lot of the disabled to death. Often times there isn't much they can do about their situation, so putting pressure on them won't be helpful. Same with many of the welfare programs.
Cutting the school lunches one to me is the most offensive. The program is designed so that children can stay in school. That is the MINIMUM requirement to have any sort of fair equal chance at life. It is supposed to be children's responsibility to go to schoool, learn so that they may become productive memebers in society. They are not adults and if you enforce responsibility like that onto them it won't be good. Children can't often get full wage jobs, and often can't rent their own places, they are already under financial difficulty. I've known kids that essentially only ate at school because their parent's were useless.
By cutting this program you would:
Be massively increasing the cost of programs for kids, now having to properly take in these kids. While increasing healthcare for these malnutritioned kids. Paying for spikes in crime since believe me that will happen (abandoned kids that are desperate and at risk of death will do what it takes if they are old enough). And lastly end up with millions more highschool dropouts that we will be paying for the rest of their lives.
Simply cutting these will have lasting costs, unless you want to move the money to roving death squads to clean up undesirables. When you look at all that it seems obvious that liberals would prefer cutting from the 901BN dollar military budget.
I find it laughable that you're willing to spend that much money to protect the people from foreign attack yet unwilling to spend to keep them from harm within your own border.
The difference is getting to orbit is a lot more complicated than atmospheric flight.
Yeah, and?
Getting off the ground was impossible for all of recorded history until someone did it. It wasn't the government that made it happen.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Amusing thought, It'd be interesting if it were planned to reduce trust in government generally by repeatedly failing OR making the dems look horrible/dragging them to failure. That way people with their short memories and only two parties to choose from will vote for the party arguing for 'less government'. They don't need to follow through with it, they know that they were voted in by people that pay little attention to specific actions in politics due to decades of plummeting trust and hope. And merely listen to emotional grandstanding. Hell, if they screw up badly enough it will only increase their chances in future after the dems get a chance to fix things.
... but the world seems too much like a sequel to Idiocracy, when is Brawndo going to become the GOP's official party drink.
http://www.thefreespeechzone.net/images/charts/bush_deficit_graphic.gif now makes sense
Disclaimer: I don't believe that the GOP's incompetence is intentional.
Are you really equating progressive social policies with slavery?
I believe both SpaceX and Blue Origin uses IAMAW workers. It would be foolish of them not to, since they tend to be better at their jobs. I wouldn't so much as fly on a plane that wasn't made by union workers, nor would I ever buy a car that was built by scabs (which means my car didn't get just get recalled, by the way).
Having union workers does not necessarily make costs greater. That only happens if management signs stupid and greedy contracts with large legacy costs.
The reason the auto companies got into trouble is because they got greedy and tried to cheap out on worker pay when they negotiated big contracts in the 70's and early 80's. They thought they could stiff the workers by promising them rich health plans and retirement benefits instead of raises. They didn't realize that health care costs would skyrocket and that the retired workers would start to live so long. The UAW's position at the time was that they wanted a reasonable raise, not "cadillac" health plans or rich retirement benefits. If management hadn't been so shortsighted and greedy, more concerned about quarterly balance sheets than long-term viability, they would not have crashed and burned.
Please remember, the years when union membership was the largest in the US were also the years when our industrial base was healthiest. Libertarians might think that the way to help American business is to have a race to the bottom with workers' wages. All that's doing is turning the US into a country with a few rich people and lots and lots of poor workers. The funny part is that all the libertarians here on Slashdot don't seem to understand that this is also the reason why their own incomes and job conditions at their miserable little tech jobs is also in decline.
It's not accidental that "Right to Work" states in the US tend to also be states that went to war to protect slavery.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"[J]ust imagine if the roads were done by private companies, there might be more that are very well maintained but something like the interstate highway system would be near impossible to create because you'd be so hard pressed to get the companies to actually cooperate in any reasonable manner."
We don't have to imagine. The U.S. railroads were an amalgam of private companies when the industry first emerged in the 19th Century. Early paved roads were also done by private companies as well.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
They were just worried about having Nazis on the moon :) Considering the Sci-Fi stories they would have been reading as kids, can you really blame them?
Please, let's be real here. The even though ORTAG was a German effort, there was substantial diplomatic pressure brought to bear upon the government of Zaire strongly suggesting that some other diplomatic favors would be granted if they would not be buying such launch services.
Yes, you can really blame these guys. If you are talking Nazis on the Moon, it would be Von Braun, the SS officer in charge of the Saturn V program. He held the rank of Colonel in the SS too.
I've been saying for 10 years or more: America is over. The image of America is really just the image of being the only large country that didn't suffer massive infrastructural damage in WWII. We were the only man standing afterward, and as a result, got to call a lot of the shots and also attract the best talent from around the world, and had a lot more money than others.
However, that "USA! USA!" image has ultimately undone us. Americans feel they are great because they are the USA, not that they should strive to be great because they are the USA. It's a bit like the student in the honors program at an American university I taught at, who was getting a solid B in my Japanese language class. He came to my office and with a straight face told me that because he was an honors student he needed me to change his grade to an A, because if he didn't get an A, he'd be out of the honors program. I suggested to him that the honors program was for people who got As, not that getting As was for people in the honors program. He didn't like that and stormed off. Then his advisor called me and chewed me out, saying "this kid is an A student!" "Um, not in my class he's not. He's doing pretty well, but not great. That's a B." This, I think, is the same confused thinking that holds the USA back. For a few decades it was able to skid along on the momentum of that head start in 1945, but without ever getting serious about any innovation or development, we're fading into irrelevance.
I'm pretty lefty (well, for the US--I live in Japan and here the same views make me right-of-center, as they do in most of the world--I consider myself a moderate conservative, but the US is so red-tinted that I look totally blue by comparison), so I have to point out that all of the projects you have pointed to are large-scale, publicly-funded projects. Most of the heavy R&D lifting anywhere has to be done with government funds, because you never know when the thing will be able to turn a profit. But if you do it right, it ends up creating lots of opportunities for the private sector to innovate around what the people have paid for, and that benefits everyone. Americans, with their (sorry) idiotic Ayn Rand Reaganite Libertarian mindset continually pat themselves on the back for their rugged individualism and individual responsibility for things that were gifts to them by the intelligent use of collective funds. That isn't to say that the private-sector doesn't innovate and doesn't sometimes do things that the govt. heavyweights can't, but, as an academic, I can tell you that virtually all fundamental research is paid for by governments. If you dig into virtually any invention or product, you'll be hard pressed not to find some concept, technique, or technology that wasn't at least partly paid for by government funds.
What am I saying? With the education system we have, all innovation is thanks to public funding.
I read a great quote, but I don't know who first said it, about Libertarians: "A libertarian is someone who looks out from the Empire State Building and thinks he's 1600 feet tall." --He totally ignores the blood, sweat, and tears shed by a multitude of forbears that put him up there and thinks it's all about him being so great and tall.
Unless we can get over our libertarian, anarchist fetishes, we can expect the future to be something that happens somewhere else, while we go back to just growing a bunch of corn for everyone, like we used to do.
I don't actually, however, think we can get over that, though. Americans are just too ignorant to even know that there's a problem. They are told they are great, so they're great. Even in the face of ever-mounting evidence that the US is mediocre at best in just about anything you care to measure, it will forever be the greatest country in the world in the minds of its citizens.
And that's why I live in Japan.
we know they're a bunch of libertarian loonies
By that definition, anyone who opposes the government holding them upside down and shaking until every cent falls out of their pockets is a loony. California needs another 50+ billion of debt for high speed rail (which btw most people will not be able to afford to ride without subsidies and more debt) like it needs a hole in the head.
And one idiot liberal who believes that a conservative is posting this.
Historically, the racists have been democrat.
But that is an ideological statement, it is your belief. It is a fine belief, but stating it that way is not really a well thought out argument.
Qxe4
The question is not "did a government organisation invent all of the technology used to land on the moon in-house?" The question is "would private industry have achieved the goal of landing a man on the moon in a decade, lacking a clear economic incentive?" The answer seems to be a "no".
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
What has the X-prize done so far? It hasn't even put people into space, or at most for a few minutes. It also happens to piggyback on about 60 years of government-funded theoretical and practical research, starting with the Germans and British in the war, and the intense US-USSR space race after that. As usual, states pay for ground-breaking research and private industry comes in afterwards and cleans up the profits.
The rest of your post is just cliches, not practical arguments. Your life expectancy in an anarchic state might be 40 years on average, though less has been common. Losing your life is one of the greater freedoms it is possible for you to use, so at least we can establish that we need government. After that many of you call for the smallest possible government, forgetting that it is impossible to have decent defence, universal education, research and development, and good infrastructure and universal healthcare (not that America really has that) without a strong central government. Or to put it more bluntly, with the kind of government you want, you wouldn't be bitching here, because there wouldn't be an Internet, a World Wide Web, and the cables that take them to your dwelling,
So don't use multi-stage and only use Orion in deep space?
The I remember talking around a plan for a Saturn rocket in the late 60s had several redundant steam-rockets. I don't know if that was actually what NASA was talking about. It appeared that by the late 70's we could have had a vertical takeoff and landing single stage to orbit Saturn class space craft with just water as an emission. Fully re-usable. It would have had the power and fuel to leave orbit with a vehicle which could return intact. If one thinks a Saturn V taking off would be interesting to watch, imagine seeing one land?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket has some info about NERVA rockets. Saturn C-5N is a Nuclear version of the Saturn 1st stage, http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/saturnv.htm I don't know what it's propellent was supposed to be but I'm sure that info is out on the web someplace.
Damn Jane Fonda for convincing the public that nuclear power was bad.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/magazine/16wwln-freakonomics-t.html
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham