Pardon me, haven't we HAD people die? Because core operational technology wasn't what we thought, and testing was discontinued, discounted or never done? NASA, the organization as a whole, is just an embarrassment. Nothing that they have claimed or promised in human spaceflight has come true for at least a generation. They spend money so that they can spend more money. After the Shuttle was made to work, it turned out to be far riskier than the space truck that had been promised, so the ISS was invented so that Shuttle would have a place to go, and the Shuttle was kept so we could go to the ISS. Its bureaucracy out of control. Neither party wants to put up the money it would actually take to fly people to the Moon, much less Mars. I can't think of a single, published, peer-reviewed, scientific discovery made by people in low Earth orbit. Can anyone? Apollo astronauts did real geology on the Moon. Plenty of remote controlled spacecraft have done plenty of science and exploration since Apollo, but all people have done is fix the HST, and that was only needed because NASA is, at its core, completely incompetent. The profits made in space are by communications satellites and remote imaging. People are a detriment to both. The dot com bubble showed that science fiction writers were bad economists and now, finally, we see that they are bad techologists too. Its genre fiction, people, not divine revelation. Time to move on.
Cheers!
Bill
Slashdot Mirror
Pardon me, haven't we HAD people die? Because core operational technology wasn't what we thought, and testing was discontinued, discounted or never done? NASA, the organization as a whole, is just an embarrassment. Nothing that they have claimed or promised in human spaceflight has come true for at least a generation. They spend money so that they can spend more money. After the Shuttle was made to work, it turned out to be far riskier than the space truck that had been promised, so the ISS was invented so that Shuttle would have a place to go, and the Shuttle was kept so we could go to the ISS. Its bureaucracy out of control. Neither party wants to put up the money it would actually take to fly people to the Moon, much less Mars. I can't think of a single, published, peer-reviewed, scientific discovery made by people in low Earth orbit. Can anyone? Apollo astronauts did real geology on the Moon. Plenty of remote controlled spacecraft have done plenty of science and exploration since Apollo, but all people have done is fix the HST, and that was only needed because NASA is, at its core, completely incompetent. The profits made in space are by communications satellites and remote imaging. People are a detriment to both. The dot com bubble showed that science fiction writers were bad economists and now, finally, we see that they are bad techologists too. Its genre fiction, people, not divine revelation. Time to move on. Cheers! Bill