With such US manned space flights, I think we're talking about champagne tastes on a beer budget....
You make good points. But it is not productive to say what we CAN'T do. We have this huge pool of resources sitting just beyond our local gravity well, and we're one of two nations that can get to it. Asia (well, China and India, I don't count Japan) may have made huge ecomomic strides, but at the cost of poisoning themselves in the process. The government can do only so much. NASA has a miniscule ($18B) budget compared to the amount of money that got pissed away on the various stimulus packages. Disproportionate, in my view, because the exploration (and exploitation) of space represents the best hope for economic revitalization that we have. Let's play to our strengths, we clearly can't build cars and t-shits better or cheaper, lets build what we build best. Innovative solutions to leverage resources. There's a reason I mentioned the Lagrangian points. They are "easy" to get to, they don't present the gravity well issues of the Moon or Mars, and they are packed with (potentially) useful raw materials. This isn't a secret. When we talk about space we generally think in terms of exploration, well we can explore with robots. But we can't exploit without people. It's there. We have the technology to make it happen. It won't be easy, but it can be done. And it isn't NASA that's going to do it, it's up to Lockheed, Boeing, and General Electric (and maybe Ford) to do it. They need a mission and a plan. They understand the relationship of investment to profit. To those who say that the time is not now, I say this is the best time. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
