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Privately Funded Lunar Mission Set a Launch Date For 2017
merbs writes: If all goes according to plan, the world's first private lunar mission will be launched just two years from now. SpaceIL, an Israeli nonprofit, has secured a launch contract with Spaceflight Industries, and will aim to land a rover on the moon in the second half of 2017. It's the first such launch contract to be verified by the $30 million Google Lunar XPrize competition. Another group called Moon Express has signed a deal with New Zealand-based company, Rocket Lab, to launch and put a lander on the lunar surface 2017.
We don't have the post WWII impetus and properly taxed corporations of the 1960s anymore. We have a fractured populace entertained to death, and any increased productivity or technological gains are immediately funneled up towards the rich.
Funny how a society with single income families and no cell phones was able to put people on the Moon, hm?
Actually both of you are wrong or at least misleading (my guess is misleading for ideological reasons; i.e. you value government projects more than you value individual wealth in the form of better material goods that even the poor have access to better than at any other point in history.) The reality is that the US government is pulling in record revenue, but adjusted for percentage of GDP, it's at about 16.9%. The post WWII period was about 17.6%.
That's not a big enough change to take away moon landings. The reality is that the money you're lamenting going into stuff that everyday people actually want (why is this a bad thing, by the way?) is really going into pork projects, such as the F-35 (oh, and that $1.2 trillion figure only accounts for the contractual costs, the actual cost of the project itself is much higher than that even though it's not done yet.)
Even if it wasn't going into pork, and I don't know about you guys, but I much prefer a situation where I (and anybody else) is able to have nice things even if it means we put off manned space exploration for 50 years.
The reason why is simple: Going to the moon is nice and all, but when you spend a crapload of money on it just for the novelty of it, then it's somewhat pointless. I think the money is better spent finding a way to do it in a practical manner that is cheap enough that you can actually afford to put people other than the world's wealthiest (or an otherwise lucky select few) into space. Read: I don't care how you try to spin it, going to the moon is pointless if we can only send about 20 people there per lifetime. All that the 1960's moon landings did was prove the concept. Until it becomes practical from a cost perspective, then we still haven't truly reached the moon yet.