Houston, We're Returning to Manned Space Flights

[Scars Unseen]

" the greatest nation on Earth should not be dependent on other nations to get into space"
wow, how far up one's own arse can someone actually be?

They do know it's the international space station right? not the US space station

Yeah, except you kind of have to admit that the US has the safest, most reliable, most efficient space program, with an extreme amount of expertise and redundancy (The Space Shuttle was I believe a 1980s platform that underwent no retrofitting and survived for almost 30 years - for a vehicle undergoing that much stress, that's amazing), a history of successful launches, with the greatest funding potential, and the ability to lift larger payloads than other international space programs.

The ISS may be an internationally co-operative project, and the modules are made in different places, but many of the early modules (and some of the later ones manufactured by member nations with insufficient space programs) were taken up by NASA.

There's also no arguing that the US has more power brokering potential than any other nation. The problem is that the potential is so often squandered by idiot "politicians" who bought their way through High School and College, and who gain power in elections where the only majority that exists is the people who simply don't vote, thus resulting in a situation where the single most powerful nation economically and militarily (though no longer culturally) is headed by a group of people who have the combined intelligence of a pygmy shrew with a brain aneurysm, about 9/10ths of whom believe that sometime soon, some dude who the Romans killed will fall out of the sky and then make people levitate into the stratosphere. These are also the same people who, being proud of their country's history of overcoming segregation and slavery and stopping the Holocaust, claim that the only "true Americans" are the people who follow a book written by a bunch of sexually frustrated shepherds that permits and endorses those same things; The same people who claim that "true marriage is between a man and a woman", yet conveniently leave out the fact that the source they take that from also says it's okay to rape people if you pay their family a silver coin and then marry the victim. And that my friend is scary. VERY scary.

You know, I'm completely irreligious, and that description of religious people still sounded more grating and condescending towards others than the NASA Administrator's comment about "the greatest nation on Earth." It is possible to be disapproving without being insulting.

OT: This is a good direction. I've thought for a long time that we needed to look towards the privatization of space travel. If it can be shown to be profitable, that would be enough to guarantee our place among the stars(you know, other than the place we're already at). If history has proven one thing, it's that no barriers exist before profit. I'm willing to utilize greed for the greater good.

 

[Ed.]

Woo more things and people in Spaaace.

This is a triumph. I'm making a note here.....HUGE SUCCESS
Ya know, in most cases, I'm not a big fan of our tendency to use capitalism to solve our problems, but in the case of SpaceX, or anything Google-related, I absolutely approve. Can't wait to see what the actual shuttles will look like, as all we've seen so far is computer models of the capsules, which seem kinda old hat in regard to NASA. Lets see some new, more efficient actual shuttle designs and not just ACME "ass strapped to a single rocket" designs we haven't used since the 60s.

Space X already built their prototype.
http://www.space.com/26063-spacex-unveils-dragon-v2-manned-spaceship.html

Boeing have a mock-up of CST-100
http://www.universetoday.com/105587/boeing-unveils-commercial-cst-100-space-taxi-to-launch-us-astronauts-to-space-from-us-soil/

 

[RandV80]

Been reading some Arthur C. Clarke recently and it's kind of sad now seeing the optimism for space exploration people had back then. A rough excerpt from 2001: A Space Odyssey concerning the space race: 'makind findly found something more interesting than warfare to occupy himself with' - internal dialogue from a scientist en route one of the moon bases in 2001.

Now I have a general idea, but this being before my time it always begs the question of what the hell happened after the moon landing? Personally I like to think we met aliens and they told the governments of the time that we weren't ready so slow down.

 

[josh4president]

About bloody time.

If I can't get a new Alpha Centauri game I might as well see to it that someday we can bloody well get there.