As Elias Friedman said, read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein. Con sider the kinetic energy of 100 tons of rock moving at 11 kilometers per second!

In military operations, owning the “high ground” is extremely valuable.

Go and read Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” if you don’t understand my point.

I know there are some who will argue that ISS is already a “Colossal NASA Mistake”, but how much worse would it be to spend all the money, effort, time, and then not even complete it, but let is burn up? At least Skylab was used before it was abandoned.

That’s called the “sunk-cost fallacy”. The fact that we have wasted money on something up to this point can never justify wasting more money on it. The money has already been wasted, wasting more money will merely waste more money, it will not get you back the money that has already been spent, or somehow turn a non-worthwhile action into a worthwhile one. The unrecoverable money you already spent cannot be used in analyzing whether to spend more, that is a logical fallacy.

When deciding whether to spend money in the future (or doing anything in the future), you must only take into account the utility of spending that money (or taking that action), the fact that you may have spent money in the past will not somehow magically make the new expenditure or action bring you greater rewards. If the rewards do not justify the cost you are planning, then they do not justify the cost, that is all there is to it. Previous costs do not change this. This is a fundamental microeconomics principle.

http://english.people.com.cn/200306/08/eng20030608_117842.shtml

The thinking goes that if China goes to the moon now, they can say “We have the will, and the capability to go to the moon and are now world leaders in space” whereas if the US doesn’t go to the moon, the best they can say is “Oh yeah, we were there first. nyah.” and that goes against the traditional US grain.

And don’t tell me NASA wouldn’t get a black eye in the public’s mind if they abandoned space station so they could cut Shuttle now (or after 1 more Hubble mission) and shift that funding over. ISS would be one more line of “Colossal NASA Mistakes” right up there with the Hubble fuzzy mirror and letting Skylab fall.

I know there are some who will argue that ISS is already a “Colossal NASA Mistake”, but how much worse would it be to spend all the money, effort, time, and then not even complete it, but let is burn up? At least Skylab was used before it was abandoned.

I have to agree however that Americans en-mass are a lazy bunch, intellectually. They’ll go to great lengths to do almost anything but think hard. They tend to be like my pair of German Shepherds: they want someone else to do the high level stuff. There’s a quote by Einstein from one of his early visits the the U.S.: “Americans are colossally bored.”

Perhaps this is ultimately why Americans stopped walking on the Moon almost as soon as they started.

- a God vs Rational Thinking government; and
- the Chinese vow to put a man on the moon.

This board talks about the GvRT government enough, so I’d like to throw into the ring the idea that Americans, when properly motivated, are capable of so much, but are otherwise kind of lazy and happy to let things slide.

The USA put a man on the moon in 1969 because the American people were motivated to beat the Russians there.

Now, I think, the American people are motivated to beat China there, doubly so due to the decrepitness of space shuttle causing a bit of a national embarassment.

So my take on it is that the combination of God-Squad government plus what amounts to a mission from said God to get back to the moon will hamper budgeting for science for a while until the God-Squad is shuffled out AND the USA can declare that it has beaten China in the (new) space race.