Thread: Space travel. Is it necessary? Do you support it?

Originally Posted by celticlord

Kennedy was before LBJ and the Great Society decided to focus on subsidizing physical and moral lassitude. Since then, the focus of the Anti-Republicans has been to make virtue out of vice. The party of Kennedy would not be a bad governing party, but that party left Washington in 1964 and never came back.

The US should gut every entitlement program if that's what it takes to balance the budget, defend the nation, and send people out to explore and eventually colonize other planets.

I really liked the democrats before the Great Society. FDR, Truman, and especially Kennedy were all great. The welfare programs that they had were truely a safety net, and not FEDERAL wealth distrubtion for the sake of it.

They were aggressive in the Cold War like the Republicans, but not as much, they supported civil rights equality, didn't have religious politics, had ballanced budgets (except during Depression) and were just cooler, ballin people anyway. :P

Clinton's the only backlash to that, in sense, and I would be voting democrat if they stayed that way.

Originally Posted by Ikari

OMG! NASA's funding is an order of magnitude above NSF and other funding agencies which fund base scientific research. The DoD and DoE spend some money on specific research as well, but talking of base science or medical research; the organizations involved with that funding has nothing compared to what NASA gets.

Hmm...

....know what NASA does? Can you tell us what the first "A" in NASA stands for without looking it up?

Originally Posted by Ikari

It's been lost. We no longer have the technology to land on the moon. That's why one of Bush's goals was to get back to the moon. We don't currently have the technology to land people on the moon anymore.

How do you lose technology?

Originally Posted by Redress

How do you lose technology?

Easy, you don't save it.

We don't have the molds, the tools, or the engineers who built the Saturn Five rockets. It's doubtful if we have a complete set of prints.

It cost money to save out of date gear and plans, and no one spent the money to mothball Apollo properly, so it's gone. We do not have a 1.5 million pound thrust engine available, and it will take a decade to rebuild one.

Originally Posted by Scarecrow Akhbar

Easy, you don't save it.

We don't have the molds, the tools, or the engineers who built the Saturn Five rockets. It's doubtful if we have a complete set of prints.

It cost money to save out of date gear and plans, and no one spent the money to mothball Apollo properly, so it's gone. We do not have a 1.5 million pound thrust engine available, and it will take a decade to rebuild one.

So it's engineering, not technology?

Originally Posted by Ikari

Hmmm....Does a scientist who has met a number of high level NASA scientists and bureaucrats know what NASA does or what its letters stand for? Let me think on this one.....

You didn't answer, you must not know.

I'm easy, you had your chance.

The word is "aeronautics".

NASA is responsible for civillian flight research, and that costs money, lots of it.

Originally Posted by Redress

So it's engineering, not technology?

Technology is banging the rocks together.

Engineering is the application of scientific knowledge to show that banging the rocks together just-so will optimize the production of flint blade flakes.