Today I’m surprised and amused again, because I’ve just learned from Gary Ansorge that it is because of hippies that there are no more people on the Moon. As it turns out, it’s another grave inheritance (besides unsafe sex and LSD fascination) that blights the humanity. Damn Woodstock!

1. Apparently Mr. IO has a reading comprehension problem. I am all in favor of unmanned space exploration (see thread above about Cassini) as are Bob Park and Steven Weinberg. It is their contention that unmanned space projects are being shelved because of the expenditures on manned space flight.

2. I’m sure that both Profs. Park and Weinberg, both liberal Democrats, would be be highly amused at being termed “right wing ideologues.”

3. Mr. IO is the one who is an idiot. All of the technological advances from the manned space program could have been accomplished from unmanned flights.

Re Gary Ansorge

Is Steven Weinberg also an old sourpuss?

All this crying about how our limited resources must be put to more pragmatic(read as “whatever I think is worthwhile”) uses is one of the reasons NASA had so much trouble maintaining adequate funding levels. The shuttle was originally a good idea but by the time Congress and the military got thru adding their input it had become a white elephant. I’m really surprised it ever got off the ground.

I love hippies. They’re gentle, brain burned druggies with no sense of how dangerous the universe can be and a compassion that seems limitless. Unfortunately, they usually don’t know squat about physics. In the ’60s and ’70s, their cry was to “take care of the unfortunate” rather than feeding all those dad gum elitist scientists,,,so we walked away from the moon, even though there were pragmatic(meaning cost effective) solutions offered to lunar/orbital settlement and Power Sat development. ( see: ssi_list@yahoogroups.com) or the web page for Mike Combs(which is actually more to the point).

There are cost effective solutions to all these arguments if we turn loose the entrepreneurs and provide some CONSISTENT seed money but the key here is to take the long view, an attribute for which politicians are not noted.

Gary 7

Sometimes, a little romance is necessary to keep the public’s attention and funding: among other things, manned space flight is romantic. I said, among other things.

I remember that the Chinese very unromantically plan for their own space station and to land on the moon. I would think they have military use in mind, for each facility…that’s why I think we should get hot to have a base on the moon, and keep the ISS. An old military axiom has it, that who holds the high ground has the victory; that applied to aircraft from WWI to present and it applies to SDI. China in space with no significant competition hands them a terrible lever. That’s very scarey.

Take how much it will cost to send the Space Shuttle up one more time.

Divide that number by how many science grad students there are in the country.

Which would get us more science, one additional shuttle flight, or thousands and thousands of grad students with access to real funding?