Smithsonian Using Kickstart Campaign To Save Armstrong's Moon Suit

qpgmr writes: The Smithsonian is appealing for assistance to raise enough money to preserve Neil Armstrong's moon suit. The "Reboot the Suit: Bring Back Neil Armstrong's Spacesuit" campaign launched Monday on Kickstarter, marking 46 years since Armstrong's moonwalk in 1969. Smithsonian reports: "....on the anniversary of that 'small step for a man,' the Smithsonian Institution announced a plan of action that is, in its own way, a giant leap for funding the job with what the Institution’s first federal Kickstarter campaign. With a goal of raising $500,000 in 30 days—by offering incentives such as exclusive updates to 3D printed facsimiles of the space suit gloves—museum officials hope to be able to unveil a restored spacesuit by the time of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing four years from now, in 2019."

Comments

Re:$805M budget

[Karmashock]

Just like we cut education spending and improved quality with the public education system right?

Sorry... nationalizing stuff is not a panacea.

The thing lost in your statistics is that the US if you compare equal demographics to equal demographics compares very very well to other countries even the hyper socialized ones.

Where things fall apart is if you compare people and cultures that exist in the US but not somewhere else.

Compare white women between the ages of 22-35 with any country you like... the US does just fine. Compare it against sweden if you like... same thing... the numbers are about the same. Where things get bad... and very bad at that is when you start to compare inner city minority populations or simply average them into the total.

Those stats are HORRIBLE. They're a fucking nightmare. Crime stats, drug addiction, literacy, high school graduation, college graduation, average income, life expectancy, infant mortality, teenaged pregnancy... the stats there are BAD.

But if you exclude that segment of the US population and recalculate... the US stats are quite good actually.

Now here you're going to say "you can't exclude a portion of the system"... okay, but now we have to admit that the problem is CONCENTRATED in a specific segment. And rather than applying your solution to EVERYONE when the problem is not suffered by EVERYONE maybe you should instead focus on what the fuck is going on in those communities that makes ALL the stats so bad. I mean, can you blame the lack of socialized healthcare on the literacy and high school graduation rates? Kinda hard to do that isn't it?

So once you're doing that, you're going to have to focus on what went wrong in these communities because they actually used to be better than that. They've gotten WORSE over time... not better. And what you'll find is that they started to get bad when a lot of welfare programs were released that disincentivized work, disincentivized a stable household, undermined the quality of inner city public education, and a tediously long list of things that really hurt those people. And it was all government action. And it was all with good intentions.

And fucked everything up.

What public service in the US do you think your new healthcare system is going to resemble. Because I can tell you now, that it would very rapidly look just like the public education system unless you instituted systemic reform in government unions just as a start.

And absent that... your idea would endanger the health of my entire country for very little if any objective return.