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Commercial Space: Spirit of Apollo Or Spirit of Solyndra?

MarkWhittington writes "Andrew Chaikin, the author of A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, believes that the spirit of Apollo no longer resides at NASA, but rather in the nascent commercial space companies such as SpaceX. This assessment is disputed by many, who see in the Obama administration program of government subsidies for commercial space the spirit of Solyndra."

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  1. Re:I'll believe it when I see it by lexsird · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    The private sector is at least trying to pick up the slack, give them a break. Our "government" has turned out to be a bunch of whores in this "slash and burn" capitalist environment. We need industry in America or we will not be able to produce pop bottle rockets if we keep going. Wall Street has turned into the new Vegas, and "fuck 'em all" financial practices have rendered us a nation of fast food industries. Face it, we are seriously screwed.

    Is there any end in sight? Yes, a bad one. The fact that we are hitching rides with Russians and Chinese to space should be embarrassing enough that our politicians should just shoot themselves in the head if they had an iota of American pride or character left. They don't, nor do they care, because they are just political whores looking to fill their pockets.

    Maybe after the Second American Revolution, and the status quo are all dead, burned and ashes pissed on, and we drag honest people kicking and screaming, fearful for their lives into office to represent us and our interests again, can we again start rebuilding our space program. If we get busy, we might actually get off this rock in time to stop some deadly asteroid bombardments from turning the whole planet into churning molten slag.

    I'm not too optimistic. We have the finest police state the world has ever seen to keep us all in line as the wage slaves that we are. There isn't enough fighting spirit left in any of the minds capable of leading these uneducated heathens we have reared, to up end this system. Hence we are doomed to ride it to the bitter end as it takes a full throttle plunge towards the bottom. Set back and enjoy the fiddle playing as Rome burns around us.

    American Space Program, that is about to be a joke on par with the Ethiopian Space Program. Who's to blame? We all are. We should have burned every Wal-Mart to the ground when they started dumping Chinese junk on our markets. We should have executed Clinton for all the secrets he let the Chinese steal and for giving them MFN trade status. We should have knocked the teeth out of anyone who said the term "free trade markets" for it not only being a complete oxymoron, but a complete traitorous sell out of every American worker. We should have been off our fat asses and watching politics just as much as we watch sports. Most of us don't even vote, and if we do vote, we vote down party lines which is fucking retarded. We couldn't find "grass roots" unless we stood on our heads in our lawns and dug.

    We are handed mental pablum in sound and video bites customized for our wee brains that have the attention span of fruit flies with ADD. Considering our technology, and our dwindling advantages, we are collectively retarded in contrast to the rest of the world's population. It's no wonder multinational corporations and their puppet politicians are able to gang rape us.

    Forget how to get to the moon? WTF is this "moon" you speak of?

    --
    Take the Red Pill.