Neil Armstrong to NASA: You Are an Embarassment

[The-Epicly-Named-Man]

Nationalist pride, because that's what America needs more of.

My thoughts exactly. I can't see any reason why they'd want to start launching their own shuttles other than "patriotism" and their incapability to accept that someone else can do something better than they can. We're never going to colonise space until a group of the richer nations create their own space programme that is not directly tied to an individual state, but rather an entirely collaborative, with each nation receiving the same amount of credit for the project regardless of the nationality of the first colonists.

Edit:

...LETS BE INTELEGENT...

Sorry, I just find that incredibly ironic. Anyway I agree with most of post except the abolishment of religion. Outright banning beliefs, however irrational they may seem, is not a viable solution. It's essentially the same as the acts of the Christian and Islamic forces during the crusades; the attempted enforcement of one power's beliefs on the other.

 

[Scorched_Cascade]

This article title put an image in my head of Neil Armstrong drunk, singing Madness's "embarrassment" to Nasa's call centre.

"No commitment, you're an embarrassment!...

 

[AgentBJ09]

"For a country that has invested so much for so long to achieve a leadership position in space exploration and exploitation, this condition is viewed by many as lamentably embarrassing and unacceptable," said the 81-year-old Armstrong.

The private sector might be the best hope for Americans to reach space, but the four-member panel of astronauts believes that the United States is making a grave mistake by no longer investing [in] manned space exploration. The nationalist pride the US won by beating the Russians to the Moon is exactly what the country needs right now.

"A lead, however earnestly and expensively won, once lost, is nearly impossible to regain," Armstrong said.

Way to go, Armstrong. You truly are an American hero, and we need more people like you and Cernan speaking up these days, because dropping space exploration like we did was a massive embarrassment, and gut wrenching to boot.

Here's hoping those shuttles go back to work at some point, and we land on the moon once again. I'd love to see that live, and I'd gladly ask the day off work to see it.

 

[ckam]

The private sector can solve any problem. You just have to let them do it.

 

[Necron_warrior]

The Space Shuttle is old, fallible and downright dangerous.

I say it's time to develop something new and hopefully more reliable.

Yeah your right it is, too bad then that Obama has dashed those hopes by forbidding any new shuttle developments in the immediate future. To be fair he's right to do so, far more important that money be spent on fixing the economy than putting blokes in space.

But I ask him this, what's cooler, the moon or Wall Street?

But what's cooler, Some old heroes on a dusty rock or Money not becoming worth the paper its printed on?

 

[SuperWombat6]

..Fuck yeah! I agree with Cernan. Dust the fucking shuttles off and send them back up. Just because they're old doesn't mean they're not useful!

The space shuttle was the biggest mistake NASA ever made. It was a political showboat and little better. What we needed were proper heavy lift vehicles, not star trek style rubbish.

lolwut? What dimension are you from? The Space Shuttles are the best thing that's ever happened to space travel. No longer did we have to spend billions on disposeable hardware. The expensive parts, computers and whatnot, were reuseable. But hey, if you think they're just political showboating then how about you break out the drawing board and come up with a reuseable spacecraft to replace them.


Go on. The world waits.

The problem with the Space Shuttle was a distinct lack of reliability. As I stated earlier, even having only two fatal accidents out of hundreds of flights is two too many. During the entirety of the capsule-based Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, there was a single fatal accident and it had nothing to do with the rocket itself (Apollo 1 had more to do with engineers' arrogance). The Apollo program's Saturn V rocket packed roughly the same amount of power as the Shuttle, and yet there was not a single accident with the rocket itself. Aside from a small glitch in the Saturn V during Apollo 13 (one of the engines cut out too early, but didn't cause any trouble), a lightning strike during the Apollo 12 launch that was fixed due to John Aaron's quick thinking, and a glitch with the modified Saturn V used for Skylab (which was also later corrected) there were no troubles with this behemoth. The Shuttle was so inefficient that there was probably just as much money going into restoring each one after a mission as was saved by their reusable nature. The most expensive part of the shuttle, the heat-resistant tiles, were not reusable. Each and every tile needed to be replaced after each flight, and those tiles are not at all cheap.

Honestly, having a reusable spacecraft isn't nearly as important as having one that works. If a crew dies because a part of the rocket couldn't take cold weather, that's fairly poor design. If another crew dies because a piece of foam wasn't secured well enough for the supersonic speeds of launch, that's poor design. A rocket with as many moving parts and complexities as the Shuttle was just asking for trouble.

 

[NinjaDeathSlap]

Nationalist pride, because that's what America needs more of.

What he said.

I still maintain that anyone who's ever been in space is officially awesome for life, but really Neil? It's not the 60's anymore, the Cold War is over. Is having to, God forbid, cooperate with the Russians really such a bad thing? Maybe it could even, y'know, go some way towards improving relations between your two countries, and end all the animosity that hasn't been anything but senseless since the early 90's?

 

[AngryFrenchCanadian]

Is that guy somehow thinking that this is the cold war all over again. Launching money into space won't precisely help your economical problems.

- Reduce military spending by half;

- Take 1/10 of those savings;

- Spend it on a new Space Program;

- ...

- PROFIT!

 

[Moosejaw]

NASA is just bread and circuses, just like the so-called war on terror as if you could declare war on an idea with no end or sane goal in sight. We're on the way out and the only thing we care about is screaming about how great we totally still are and which pop star is self-destructing this week. I suppose it's way better to live with that sort of ignorance and spend your way to economic collapse than to acknowledge reality and stop it. Dems, Reps, meet the new boss same as the old boss.

 

[Necron_warrior]

The Space Shuttle is old, fallible and downright dangerous.

I say it's time to develop something new and hopefully more reliable.

Yeah your right it is, too bad then that Obama has dashed those hopes by forbidding any new shuttle developments in the immediate future. To be fair he's right to do so, far more important that money be spent on fixing the economy than putting blokes in space.

But I ask him this, what's cooler, the moon or Wall Street?

But what's cooler, Some old heroes on a dusty rock or Money not becoming worth the paper its printed on?

I don't care, I still want to see people on the moon!

Fair enough. I guess I WOULD like to say Ive been part of a generation where people have been on the moon, but what excactly would they DO up there?
...besides 0-G basketball.

 

[Venats]

The Space Shuttle is old, fallible and downright dangerous.

I say it's time to develop something new and hopefully more reliable.

They had far safer, more reliable, cheaper, and better devices in the 1960s, they were called the Apollo Rockets, perhaps you've heard of them? It high time NASA stopped showing its blatant corruption and did something smart.

 

[Elijah Ball]

if they want to fork up the fucking billions of dollars, let em keep nasa. until we're out of this ridiculous debt we cant spend that much money on a non essential program.

 

[MajorDolphin]

The Space Shuttle is old, fallible and downright dangerous.

I say it's time to develop something new and hopefully more reliable.

We were developing one but it was cancelled. Now all the talent NASA had locked up moved on to the private industry. Just another smooth move by the american government.

 

[Dumbdumbjr]

I was ashamed to call myself a gamer when I read some of the comments on here. Arguing against manned space exploration is arguing against everything we hold dear, not only as gamers but as the human race. Space holds the answers for every problem we have here down on earth. Space is literally the final frontier, we need to go out there and discover strange new worlds and new civilizations, to boldly go, as the old television show once put it. I can't believe we are putting this in terms of dollars and cents, the destiny of the human race does not have a price tag.

Plus, dammit, I want to set foot on the moon, myself, and I. AM. NOT. giving up hope.

You and I have a lot in common. Id be down for living in the street and putting every cent I have in to a space program just to visit that white god damn ball in the sky. I get that it costs money to do that, but it also costs money to fight wars in countries when you have no real right to. (Nudge nudge). To infinity, and beyond.

 

[draythefingerless]

Is that guy somehow thinking that this is the cold war all over again. Launching money into space won't precisely help your economical problems.

That's the sort of attitude that would have had Christopher Columbus stay at home!

Fact is, we're all going to feel real stupid when we spend a hundred odd years trying to solve the economic crisis, only to find there's a huge suitcase full of money hidden on the dark side of the moon. (Not a literal suitcase full of money, of course... though, that said, I do believe there's still a large amount of Nazi Gold unaccounted for...)

No it isnt. Christopher Columbus was part of a much parallel race to the cold war space race. It was called the who-can-get-to-India-first-without-going-thru-the-Arabs race.(Portuguese technically won that race by a landslide, not only getting first to India by going around Africa, but also by not discovering North America that was a pile of no resources, and capturing Brazil, half a continent of gold). Christopher Columbus was hired to sail out on the order of the Spanish and find a commercial route to the East. The basic idea was to sail West till you get East(a round earth was gradually being accepted after the discovery that the so caled end of the world at Bujador Cape wasnt there).

So in short, this WAS the sort of attitude that got Columbus his funding and ships in the first place.