Neil Armstrong to NASA: You Are an Embarassment

[Tyzamar]

Fuck politics and this stupid war in Iraq. I want to know what's out there! Why can't people see what's really important =/

 

[SenseOfTumour]

So let me get this straight - a country that prides itself on capitalist democracy should have a socialist space program when they're still arguing socialist health care is a bad thing?

Home of the Brave...I guess the kind of bravery that's a kin to stupidity.

Makes perfect sense to me, if they send only the terminally ill into space, they don't have to factor in the costs of return flights. They can also save money on safety and all the savings of a one use rocket.

*cue masses at the launch of the next space mission chanting 'LET THEM DIE!'*

I wish I was being half as cynical as some of the people in the crowds I've seen at speeches recently.

 

[Syzygy23]

You know whats bad for a countries pride though? Going down yet another credit rating. Or going bankrupt and plunging the world into another recession.

You know what should be bad for pride? Leading the way in an ever widening poor/rich divide and sinking the world further into pollution. Or millions of children without the right to be healthy. Or you know, struggling to pass a gay marriages bill.

Space travel is cool and all, but there are other things that need to be done right now, not a petty feud that your old (defeated) cold war sparring partner is helping you out

Did you really just compare Gay marriage to space travel? If I had the choice of mining asteroids and colonizing other planets or legalizing butt sex, I'm gonna go with awesome space travel.

 

[Kittynugget]

NASA, like all scientific research is always a net gain to our economy. Almost everything around us is the result of scientific study. Hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide have been produced from this research. Cutting science funding to save money is like abusing hard drugs to escape depression, it may feel good today but in the long run it screws you over. I really think we should try to reach Mars before China. Sorry, but I don't think a country that has butchered 100,000,000 of its own citizens, kills any dissenters, rapes the environment, and censors their internet deserves that bragging right.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

The Space Shuttle is old, fallible and downright dangerous.

Aren't the onboard computers powered by Pentium 2 processors still?

I saw Species 2 a few years back (yeah it was bad), but their Mars rocket had all sorts of company brands and logos painted on the side (kinda pointless since no one would see them, not the least wrong thing in that movie). It seems it will fall to the private sector, but aren't most of those "American" companies no longer owned by Americans?

 

[Riobux]

I'm sorry, but it's hard to see Neil Armstrong as still being relevant to this age. This age is no longer about space exploration because, to be honest, there's more important things than space travel currently like the global debt hanging over everyone's head and the lack of stability between the east and west.

 

[Rack]

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.

Cents aren't involved at all and the only dollars involved are billions. Consider the opportunity cost, just how many lives is it worth for you to believe we're living in the Star Trek continuity? It has to be a hell of a lot.

 

[Traun]

I am with this man [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A23OBHat3A&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PL3FF6BDC449147456] on the issue, NASA is cool and all but it's time for private investors, large and small to step up and show that going into space isn't nation exclusive.

 

[Akytalusia]

it was a sad day when we decided to stop funding space exploration in the US. but as long as someone is still doing it, tbh, i don't care who it is. there's no reason it has to be the US. that kind of thinking is just foolish arrogance.

all things considered, it should actually be a unified global effort. the research is important, for the earth, not individual countries. all of this private business is just slowing down progress.

 

[Nikolaz72]

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!

wouldn't even need to touch the military budget, look at how much were spending on weapons development and "testing".
I say cut the testing see if it shoots then shoot it at some people in what ever shit-hole our military is in, if it ends up turning him into a flesh-eating goo monster... we still got a few nukes lying around somewhere.
seriously darpa spends a ton of money on some really stupid shit, they've made a lot of good stuff don't get me wrong, but holy crap some of the stuff they had to of been under the influence of drugs and crazy people to develop.
such as... a robot made of bags... that can barely fuck move... its more of less a inflating/deflating foot ball... yeah.
mean while they also have the proto 2 project which should be getting a flood of their funding... but did i mention the robot that eats stuff for fuel... oh yeah, that is really useful...

It would be in space. Imagine if we can develope something that can refuel by eating an astroid! We could send it to the other end of our galaxy, with minimum fuel wasted.

 

[Jestere]

"The nationalist pride the US won by beating the Russians to the Moon is exactly what the country needs right now."

Wasn't the whole Space-Race an offshoot of the Cold War? That's err... an interesting comment to make.

The last thing you guys need is more Nationalist pride.

(And you just had country-wide parties because a man had his head blown off; how much more Nationalist do you want to get?)

(foreword: I'm not American, I'm Australian)

What was it that Einstein said? "Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." Honestly, nationalism is ridiculous, giving lines on a map more importance than people. How many millions of lives have been lost over the years in the name of "nationalism" "patriotism" and "national pride". Far too many, I'm pretty sure it's not the sort of thing we want to be encouraging

 

[Mr Dizazta]

My feelings on the situation, I am pissed that the US would do such a thing in the first place. Why can't we as a species get along with each other? The entire space race should not be a competition, but a joint effort by the major nations. If let private companies work on the development of spacecrafts, guess who may someday also control mineral or other resource rights to other planets. We as a species need to put aside our petty differences and create some kind of joint alliance. Hell, the folks at CERN already broke the light barrier, time to reach for the heavens.

 

[Trippy Turtle]

How about we stop caring who does it as long as humans get out there. You know before Yellowstone explodes or aliens invade or something.

 

[EHKOS]

WTF....WE DIDN'T BEAT THE RUSSIANS. They were the first! Gosh. I really wish more important people would stand up like this. To denounce what the government is doing as wrong.

 

[Dark Knifer]

..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.

Isn't it a bit odd to say it only had 2 and saying the others were completely fine if you ignore the one or two small problems that may have ended badly and could be fatal... I'd say that's a pretty remarkable record and after these accidents they would have taken new precautions and better designed the spacecraft. Writing the whole thing of for this would be like abolishing the automotive industry because cars crash from time to time. It's just unreasonable and they should either improve the designs or start something new instead of just forgetting about it.

 

[Angry Camel]

So, a country that is deeply in debt, has a very bad healthcare system and has lost thousands of men in a war needs to get back into space ASAP. Armstrong and the others seem to have their priorities a bit warped.

 

[Brandon237]

I'm not american so I don't feel that "american pride" yack yack. But some advice: less wars in the Middle East. More money for NASA. Sounds fair?

If they cut their spending there significantly, they could fund two projects for new space-crafts! Hell, they could have a second NASA with that money, you know, shits and giggles. I think it is stupid to retire it without a plan to get something better up there.
Although I don't really have anything against Russia, and if they do it well... then it seems that in the long term, they won. Weird thought, but so long as they are good with their power all's good.

 

[repeating integers]

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So, faster-than-light travel may have been discovered - just after NASA scraps its main tool for reaching space. Is that irony, or just a depressing coincidence?

 

[Dendio]

Seems the private sector is taking over the country. This space program stuff is a waste of time and money. We need to focus on improving life for people on earth rather than running pointless experiments in space.