Great, cause nothing fires the imagination like a safer, inflation adjusted, cost efficient retread of something we lost interest in 50 years before.

And last time we did it within a decade. 2018? Pffft!

"new rockets largely made up of components from the space shuttle program"

Safer? Did you say safer?

Sorry, Dr. Symes, but I gotta call bullshit on this.

First, to say that there's no reason to go back to the Moon is just dumb. That's like saying you've been to Queens once, ergo you've done New York. We've explored far less than 1% of the moon's surface, and we don't know much about the most interesting parts of it -- namely, the poles. At the poles, there is frozen water ice and plentiful heavy hydrogen (read: rocket fuel!).

The moon has much to teach us yet, but it has value above a scientific target. First, it is much closer than Mars is, and you want someplace comparatively close when you're testing out manned space hardware. Light-travel time between earth and moon is about a second; light travel between Earth and Mars can be anywhere from five to fifteen minutes depending on the planets' relative positions. You want to be able to talk to your astronauts quickly during the shakedown cruises.

Also, it takes a hell of a lot of energy to get to Mars -- much more than the Moon. You can get a lot of equipment to the Moon for the same energy budget as a much smaller mission to Mars -- so what you do is stage your rocket-building enterprise to the Moon, where your Mars rockets don't have Earth's huge gravity well to climb out of. You also use the Moon to train your astronauts in extra-terrestrial field geology -- which is to say, doing geology while in a clumsy pressure suit. Again, you learn to do this stuff while the Earth is relatively close rather than millions of miles away.

And yes, it does depress me that fifty fucking years will have passed between the first moon landing and the next one -- and that's if things go right and there are no roadblocks along the way. Those engineers back in the 1950's and 1960's had the kind of guts, drive, and vision that these modern pussies can only envy.

*Sniff*. I'm gonna go watch The Right Stuff again.

It's a big f-ing universe, I say we start exploring it again.

Right Stuff is okay, but From the Earth to the Moon rocks hard!

2018?
WTF?
I thought we could go to the moon anytime we wanted on a moments notice. What with this being 2005 and all and we went to the moon 40 years ago and shit.

I mean WTF did we build the damn space shuttle fer?

I thought Mars was the next hurdle?

Why can't we build a stargate? That'll be fun.

Mars? What’s the big deal?

Martian women have three boobs each.
I saw it on the bookcover.

Monty, baby, I loved The Right Stuff too. Scott Glenn doin that 'My name is Jose Jimenes" thing all the time? Then he has to ask that one guy to use the bathroom? Classic.

But it's just that sort of foggy, scifi movie inspired NASA romance I just don't get - just ain't feeling. First of all, you talk about 'exploring the moon." Putting aside the whole "Why manned missions to do it?" question I have with pretty much any NASA program, I wanna ask, have you seen pictures of the moon? Frankly, exploring Queens holds more interest for me.

I'm sorry. NASA's run out. They're thrashing around trying to find something to inspire the public, places to put man (why manned again?) that'll give them some reason to exist, or at least keep their budget from downsizing.

I don't doubt that whole 'Man's destiny is in space" line. But why use tax money to do it when it's still bleeding edge cost wise stuff? People generally answer that question by saying something like "Space is different, it's Important, it's mythical, it's...." Sorry, it ain't. Least not for me.

Maybe a government has to do it to be the first, to beat the Soviets to a historical moment, but I just don't see those historical "Man on X" moments out there anymore.

Safer? Did you say safer?

SRB's - they work for the most part and are low-tech. Basically a spiffed up bottle rocket.

Mercury/Gemini/Apollo style ablative reentry heat shields are well explored terrain and very reliable.

Dr Symes:

Man, gimme a break! I've not only seen pictures of the moon, I've sat outside on frigid winter nights and taken pictures of the moon (CCD imager on an old Celestron telescope). I just cannot fathom how people can look at it and see nothing but a rock -- it is a planet, a whole other world orbiting 250,000 miles away. it is a world that we know very little about; to think that our tentative little forays there have told us all we need to know is (as I said before) just dumb.

But it is the moon as a staging point for Mars that this strategy makes the most sense. Think of it like you would lifting weights -- you don't just go directly to the 500lb weights; you start lighter and build your muscles. The fact is, we don't know shit about building a sustainable presence on another world, and it's far better to learn this stuff while close to the Earth than far away. The Moon is our training ground for Mars.

And I might point out that The Right Stuff is (given some obvious poetic license) pretty much an accurate summation of that period of our history. This is not fiction, friend; Chuck Yeager, Alan Shepard, and the rest of those folks really did that stuff. And they did it with almost no money, and in rickety dangerous equipment that blew up as often as not. We went to the moon using computers that couldn't even run an MP3 player nowadays.

I sometimes think about what we did with the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo program and I am amazed all over again at what they did. Think about it: in 1950, we hadn't even gotten into space yet. Not quite twenty years later, we were walking on the moon. And then...we just gave up. We lost the will to keep doing it. I hope that this time our national will stays strong; otherwise, people in the first lunar settlement (and Mars settlement too) will probably be speaking Chinese or Russian.

.
Two points:

One, the reason we need to get back to the moon is quite simple: strategic military asset. Period. You control the space above the earth, you control the skies. Think airspace supremacy, writ large.

Two, NASA is a bunch of unimaginative governemt bureaucrat wussies (that may be redundant). If it's going to happen, it's better to throw it open to private enterprise.

Does the name Harriman ring any bells?

speedster1:

I wholeheartedly agree with the "private enterprise" idea of space exploration, but for lots of reasons the "big stuff" is going to have to be government-funded for some time. Why? One reason: incentives. Why would a businessman spend hundreds of millions of dollars to mount a Mars mission (or even a moon mission)? What return could he promise his shareholders on anything like a reasonable timeframe?

There might be money to be made in LEO (space tourism and the like), but heavy industry in space is a long way off yet -- decades at least, and maybe as long as a century. The technology too is still to raw and expensive to be attractive to investors -- outfits like SpaceX are developing more advanced hardware, but it's still untested, and none of the private stuff even comes close to the heavy-lift capability a major business concern would need.

I said this over and over to the entrepreneurs among us: if you want businesspeople to invest in space exploration, given them an infrastructure to invest in. At present it's all risk and very little return, which translates into precious little incentive for private industry. But if the U.S. Government can "lay the highway" to the moon and Mars, all of a sudden the risks and returns tend to look a bit more attractive.

We went to the moon using computers that couldn't even run an MP3 player nowadays

Much worse than that.

As I recall, the LEM computer had ~4K of memory and was so slow they went to manual for the final descent because the computer wasn't keeping up.

The shuttle main flight computers were a bit better - 256K. Still magnetic core memory though, and the processors are still built from discrete components - no VLSI, LSI, MSI, or SSI.

The boxs I worked on 25 years ago (controls the screens and keypads you see in a shuttle cockpit pic) had 32K of magnetic core. All discrete components.

"We went to the moon using computers that couldn't even run an MP3 player nowadays."

Vacuum tubes, friends. At surplus sales you can pick up mid-60s SOTA freq generators, o'scopes, etc. made by Tektronix and Hewlett-Packard, the same kind of stuff used by those early engineers, and it's all vacuum tube equipment.

That was a very different age.

Call me a cynic, but the timing sounds like a PR scheme to boost falling poll numbers.

Dude, it's a rock. A rock. Really. Is there really something you think they'll be able to tell you about it that'll get you excited? Wait, it's 25% Boron and not 23%. Does a man need to go there to get that info. Besides, you know what we'l find. Craters, that's what. Bunch of craters. Some'll be bigger than the ones we seen already, some smaller. No archeology finds. No ruins of civilzations to explore.

I agree on their MARS plan though. NASA's playing a leverage game. We're uncomfortable with the big price tag of the MARS trip, so they think they can get it from us in installments. Make us cough up enough to do this moon thing, then go back in X years and say, "Hey, you alread spent all this money to gt the tech to send us to the moon, now it's just a couple hundred billion more now to go to Mars. Same technology. Whaddya say Why, you can't afford NOT go to Mars now."

And yeah, knew Right Stuff is non fiction. But a lot of the geek appeal 'Let's go to Mars' attraction comes right out of every boys desire to BE Han Solo - to make out with Leia and pilot the Falcon. HE was sooo cool. (Greedo did NOT shoot first) Not saying I didn't wanna be him too, but it's a silly motivation for a massive gov. program, no?

Da moon would be a good staging point. For parties. Rock concerts. Ultra-Ball.

I'm sure there are a lot of nice things laying around, like gold and shit. We could use moon gold to pay the roadies.

"Call me a cynic"

Ok. You're a cynic.

HTH

Dr. Symes,

Dude, it's a rock.

You're busting my balls here! Sincerely. It is not a "rock", even in the relatively euphemistic way you use it. Put differently: if it's just "a rock", then so is the Earth -- it's just that Earth has a thin little greasy film of biomass over it. The Moon is rich in things like rare-earth metals (platinum especially), sulfur, heavy hydrogen, and probably lots of water-ice in shaded craters at the poles.

And the Moon is a beautiful place. Look at some of the Hasselblad photos of the Appenine range that the Apollo 13 guys took. And I love the names they gave to features on the moon: Sea of Tranquility, Sea of Storms, Sea of Crises. I guess I'm like Farouk El Baz: I love the Moon.

Oh, well. The Moon is the Solar System's version of Rodney Dangerfield -- it gets no respect.

I meant Apollo 15, not Apollo 13.

Monty, ah, we've all got out beautiful obsessions. Sometimes the moon looks all pretty to me, but then sometimes I'm just disappointed it's never as big and looming as they sometimes make it look in the movies.

At least we agree on The Right Stuff. We'll always have that, sugar.

Monty, ah, we've all got out beautiful obsessions. Sometimes the moon looks all pretty to me, but then sometimes I'm just disappointed it's never as big and looming as they sometimes make it look in the movies.

At least we agree on The Right Stuff. We'll always have that, sugar.

Ah, the double post. Invalidating every point the poster makes by serving proof of their inability to master a keyboard.

In closing: The moon must be destroyed!

In closing: The moon must be destroyed!

Cheaper than going there.

I knew an engineering student who did a lot of interning at NASA-- who knows what she's up to nowadays, but anyway. She would always roll her eyes at people who scoffed at NASA, moon voyages and the space program in general, because they simply DON'T understand what's going on there beyond what they see in TV and movies. The technological advances we've made over the past half century as a mere by-product of the space program are supposedly pretty doggone staggering. She once said to me that she hopes that the kind of people who say the space program isn't good for anything, will one day come down with some sort of heart disease that we can only treat nowadays because of the medical advances we've made via NASA and so forth. Food for thought.

Besides, we also need to pre-emptively attack the hostile Mooninite creatures, who have evolved beyond all rules and manners.

What do you mean go BACK?! We never went there in the first place.

It was all just staged and shot in a hanger at Area 51. You guys are such suckers. Didn't you watch "Capricorn One?"

Tang. Don't forget Tang.

Seriously. Blow the fucker up.
But let me know ahead of time so I can set up some lawn chairs in my backyard.

The moon must be destroyed!

Oh, I get it now! You're one of Frank J.'s minions! I knew your irrational hatred of our Moon must have had some darker cause.

Monty, won't it be nice not to have them darn ocean tides anymore?

We left our soul on the moon.

It's time to get it back.

And space food sticks! Yummy!

Tang. Don't forget Tang.

Should have left that crap in space.

It's like powdered stomach acid.

Used to eat it by the spoonfull.

GO YANKS!

GO GINTS!

FUCK YOU BOSTON!

I love that scene out of Married With Children where Al whips out a slice of white bread, runs it around a nearly-empty jar of Tang, and pronounces it "Tang Wipe". I've called white bread "Tang Wipe" ever since then. As in, "a loaf of wheat and a loaf of Tang Wipe" or "bologna and cheese on Tang Wipe".

Remember grape Tang? They had that out for about a week and a half sometime in the mid-1970's, and I think my mom bought the whole supply. We drank that stuff for years afterward.

Tubino idiotically speculates: and it's all vacuum tube equipment.

Bzzzt, wrong answer. You are 100% full of shit asshole.

I was one of Rockwell's flight computer engineers and was there for STS-1/2/3, what are your qualifications to comment on this stuff?

IBM AP101 (main flt computers) - discrete transistor logic
IBM SP0 (cockpit displays/keypads) - discrete transistor logic
Hughs A10INS (HUD) - discrete transistor logic

*sigh*

This stuff makes me so sad.

I miss this stuff. I miss the lean years, the electric tension of discovery, the political tension with the Soviets, the advances, the set backs.. the guts. Pure horn-rimmed, engineering goober, slide-rule wielding you got more computing power in your Chevy than we took to Mare Tranquillitatis magnificence of America.

My dad worked for NASA. For Dr.Von Braun. A man who insisted his company name should be spelled and pronounced "Brown" because he embraced his new country (and knew politics). I was there when he and so many of his engineers and their families became citizens.

Yeah, I had a crew cut.

I remember dad coming home when Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in 67. I remember seeing his face (tear-streaked again) when Lovell made it back with Fred Haise and Jack Swigert (RIP).

I was 11.

Challenger and Columbia brought those things back. OT.

Those accomplishments, those moments in our lives, were magnificent, painful, wonderful.

Going back to the moon isn't enough.

I miss being inspired by space. I wonder if I ever will be again?

Laura, if you get caught between the moon and New York City, I'll laugh my ass off in schadenfreuden delight. It's crazy, but it's true.

Proof the moon missions were fake--coming right up.

You Earthlings and your third dimension. It's cute.

We've gotten this far in the thread and no one has pointed out that both Red Planet and Mission to Mars sucked? Species II was better than both of them, and that film really sucked. I was all excited to go to Mars until I saw those films. I say we can't fund interplanetary travel until Hollywood makes a cool movie about the idea. If we can't make an inspirational movie about it for 200 million, then the realization of the idea at 1000 times the cost will probably fall flat, too.

Although ... I was inspired by the idea of shooting Tim Robbins into outer space.

Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffe

You and I are probably the only ones here who remember their names without googling for it.

Columbia was *MY* bird - yea we felt "ownership".

I was hunkered down in a control room in Downey CA (Rockwell's Space Division HQ) making sure my boxes didn't fuck up, and if they did, I had to have an answer and a fix on the spot.

It was a different era.

I was young Tony,

but you remember the things that make your dad cry.

The evidence is irrefutable. The moon landings were a hoax.

Caspara, Robinson Crusoe on Mars was great, though.

You know why we need to do this Dave?

For the failures. Overcoming failures expands knowledge. We learn a LOT more from failures than successes.

Check out "To Engineer Is Human" by Henry Petroski if you can find a copy.

Texas Dave,

My Pop was an engineer for Boeing from '66 to '69 in Huntsville on the first stage of the Saturn V.
I still get chills watching rockets go up.
I know exactly how you feel.

harrison,

we moved from Satellite Beach to Huntsville in 1964. There till 69 when we came to Texas.

I still remember that amazing rumble when they were test firing the 3rd stage engine. We lived south, off Memorial Drive, so maybe 7-8 miles away.

Used to eat it by the spoonfull.

Blech.

That is just wrong. Of course, I haven't had Tang in awhile. I may have to purchase some just for nostalgia's sake.

Dave,
I remember it, too.
Was the whole thing so cool because we were kids and our dads were rocket scientists?

Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffe

Weren't those guys from "The Right Stuff?"

Granted we CAN do it - why should we? Seriously, what strategic, political, economic or technological advantage is there to re-creating what we did 30+ years ago? Sure, it's nice to explore and do science, but we could fund a lot of research and basic science education programs here on Earth for a fraction of the cost.

Yes, it would be cool to go and harvest heavy hydrogen or Helium-3, but can we (or will we be able to) use it in nuclear reactors in any enonomically meaningful way? I suppose it would be nice to have an advance base on the moon in case we had to rig a rocket to destroy an asteroid heading for Earth, but do we NEED a moon base for that?

As for seizing the strategic high ground, space-based weapons in near-Earth orbit would be a LOT more useful, not to mention having much better reation times. As for a jumping off point for a Mars run - sure, it would be nice if we could affort it. I don't see how we can unless and until we radically change the way we run things domestically (how many pork projects will YOUR congressman cut to fund a Mars shot? Any at all?)

I've heard some people suggest we use the unmineable parts of the moon for dumping Earth's worst garbage (nuclear waste and so forth).

If we become more dependent on nuclear power, I could go with the argument of dumping nuclear byproducts up there to cool off. But then, I'd be interested in reasons not to do so.

but we could fund a lot of research and basic science education programs here on Earth for a fraction of the cost.

As I said, you do it for the failures you will overcome. Space is the harshest most unforgiving environment we can put our technology to the test in.

Land based programs simply can't provide the "push" in materiels science and technology advancment that going into space will.

.
Pyramid:

Nope, wrong. SBW's are vulnerable to a host of problems: orbits decay, killer satellites, electromagnetic pulses, heck, just plain wear & tear.

Whereas, you own the moon, you can just throw a ROCK at any target Earthside; think "kinetic energy weapons." Low cost, low tech, just point and shoot (okay, throw).

Just spitballin'.

Still no takers on Harriman, hunh?

Speaking of Mars and private industry:
Company Wants Settlers on Mars

Tony: I see your point, but we have ALREADY gone to the Moon - we know what to expect. Will the benefits exceed the costs based on what you are saying? Maybe, but we are looking at big unknowns here.

Speedster1: Yes, a Moon fort will be safer, but unless we are using energy weapons with a high fraction of C reaction time, you are going to need to be a lot closer to hit a time urgent target or anything that moves. Maybe we could compromise with orbital battle stations in L5 orbits or some such.

Who cares about the Moon? I want that space elevator. Everything else follows.

In light of how utterly inadequate the Shuttle program has been, NASA either needs to focus on the development of new launch systems or be dissolved so that it no operates as an impediment to private industry. We had a very good run of R&D in the days of the X programs but then we stopped doing things that ways and everything has been orders of magnitude more expensive for far less return on the investment.

The belief that all of mdern technology was driven by the space program is wildly false. The number of technologies driven directly by NASA's needs are quite narrow. Tang was a product whose development started during WWII and had been languishing in obscurity until NASA gave it a marketing bonanza. (The previous campaign of 'horrible stuff you'd have to be stuck in a tin can clinging to survival to find acceptable' just didn't seem to connect with consumers.) The Cold War miltary needs and the increasing value of computers to business did far more to drive the creation of integrated circuits than NASA. Missiles needed better guidance systems before NASA existed and there was alreay tons of money to be made by any company that could pack more logic in a specified weight and volume envelope. That this benefitted NASA as well was just a happy coicidence.

We'd be far better off today if NASA had never been in the launch business. THe Air Force always did a far better job of that. Even recently, they got the DC-XY program up and delivering real world testbed results while coming in well under budget. Then they handed it over to NASA. NASA promptly destroyed it and let the program die, instead starting a new Shuttle-esque program that blew huge sums of money without ever producing anything whatsoever, except continuing paychecks for bureacrats.

I was there that day at White Sands, New Mexico when they performed what Larry Niven called the 'death swoop.' It had never been done before and was a crucial test for crating a SSTO system. It was a glorious moment right until it fell into NASA's hands and became a memory. So I would shed no tears if NASA were dissolved and the Air Force given a new misssion to secure efficient and highly available access to orbit for the USA.

Tony sez: "Bzzzt, wrong answer. You are 100% full of shit asshole."

Jeez, overreact much?

No, no, I never said they had no solid state equipment. But the majority of analysis equipment used in early to mid-60s was still tube-based. You're talking computers, I'm talking about the oscilloscopes used to engineer a lot of the equipment.

And hey, you know what? I love that old stuff. I love how it smells as it warms up. The old HP generators still put out a clean sine wave at 40 volts, which is not insignificant.

When did Tektronix introduce a serious solid state 'scope? I don't know the year.

Don't go to the moon, it is too far. Don't send Christopher Columbus out searching for a new trade route to India, it is too dangerous. Don't build automobiles, horses are so much better.

I'm amazed that anyone is against returning to the moon. It is a natural first step to colonizing the solar system. Humans need a frontier, someplace to go to escape the socialist, collective, intrusive governments of the world.

Sign me up, I'll go.

Sorry I'm late.

The moon. BFD. Just one more attempt by NASA to show us how out of touch they are. $108 Billion? That amounts to about $2K for every taxpaying family. I don't know about you guys, but that is some serious change in my neighborhood. I can think of better ways of spending MY money.

But then, NASA only thinks in terms of "other people's money". Then money is no object compared to all the possible (but incredibly unlikely)future benefits.

I'm with Tony - we need to have an aggressive space program, and Bush's Mars mission was mocked by the masses. [disclosure: I've done thermal protection research for NASA and probably will do more in the future] We need as a society to look outward and forward - otherwise scrabbling through our little lives doesn't have much meaning.

Why not the moon? We haven't been there for 30 years: we need to regain our lost ground before we send missions further into the solar system. Plus the Chinese are going there - you gonna let them walk on the moon when we can't? The Chinese are going so they can tell their people and the world that they have arrived. We need to go to show that we've been here all along and we're planning on staying.

If it helps get the job done, think of the Moon as Earth's own ANWR - a nice pristine place waiting to be defiled in service to Man.

I'm all for going back to the Moon -
but this time setting up shop,
having the moon act as a sort of an Everest Base Camp,

and then on to Mars, bitches.

Also, the Defense / Military-Industrial-Complex types get a bad rap. The salaries paid to these workers ended up justifying a lot of engineer types going pursuing their degrees and paying for a lot of college education for their kids.

A great deal of the cost in that $1,000,000 missile is labor.

Slub, Gus Grissom was one of the original Mercury astronauts. Dad said he could be a real son of a bitch. Very tough on the contractors.

And he was right. RIP Gus.

harrison, yeah, amazing times. Dad was a communications engineer. He developed a multitrack recording system using Ampeg equipment for Dr. Von Braun's staff meetings - where a bunch of scientists would yell at each other in English and German. Von Braun didn't want to miss any of it.

I still remember going to work with him at the Cape on a Saturday morning - in the middle of this wall of computing equipment was an RCA monitor. He'd tune in Saturday morning cartoons for me to watch. Bugs Bunny in the middle of all those flashing lights and meters.

It was only 66 years from Kitty Hawk to the moon. This is an amazing country.

Two things:

1. Anybody remember the Tom Lehrer song about Werner von Braun (titled "Werner von Braun")? Marvelous stuff. I believe it went something like this:

Let me sing you the tale
of Werner von Braun
A man whose allegiance
is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi and he won't even frown:
"Nazi, Schmazi," says Werner von Braun.

Some have harsh words
for this man of renown
But some say our attitude
should be one of gratitude.
Like the widows and cripples in Old London Town
Who owe their large pensions to Werner von Braun.

Don't say that he's hypocritical!
Say rather, that he's "apolitical."
"Once the rockets go up,
"Who cares where they come down?
"That's not my department," says Werner von Braun.

You too can be a great hero
Once you learn to count backwards to zero.
"In German, und English, I know how to count down!
"Und I'm learning Chinese," says Werner von Braun.

2. BumperStickerist: I will support the Mars program, if, and only if, we make the official motto, "On to Mars, bitches."

Slub, Gus Grissom was one of the original Mercury astronauts. Dad said he could be a real son of a bitch. Very tough on the contractors.

Cool. I was a space nut as a kid. One of the coolest moments in my PR career was meeting John Glenn when he came to speak to the campus where I worked.

I didn't care that he had been a Democratic senator, or any of that stuff. He was John freakin' Glenn - the first American to orbit earth.

Plus, he was a heck of a guy. His 'handlers' kept trying to keep him on schedule, but he stopped to spend a few minutes with a kid who asked him about what it was like to go up to space 'in a rocket.'

Ace doesn't get it.
Rocket's are awesome as hell.
Buncha space pussies.

Pompous,

HA! I've never heard that.

But Tom was on to something. von Braun was a self-aggrandizer of the highest order. He managed to align himself with the Army in the missile program, and juked the Air Force out of the way on the Mercury program, which is why they switched to that little sub-orbital Vanguard (they didn't blow up as much).

He and his team figured out how to build that behemoth Apollo and make it work. Brilliant man.

I guess it's a case of he may be a son of a bitch, but by God, he's our son of a bitch. Or as they said in The Right Stuff, "our Germans are better than their Germans.

Slub, I met John Glenn before I cared about politics. He was a heck of a nice guy. And one of the heros of my youth.

Why don't they do something worthwhile like build the space elevator?

http://www.spaceelevator.com/

The asshat that keeps on giving: Mayor Ray Nagin.On Tuesday, Nagin had harsh words for the federal government’s top official in the city, Coast Guard Vice Adm. Thad Allen, who he said “stepped outside his lane by talking directly to the citizens of New Orleans. I respect what federal officials are doing down here, but they do not fully comprehend what it’s like to lose your home, to lose everything and not know and to be sitting out there for three weeks. So I think it’s important for people to come back and at least take a look,” Nagin said on NBC’s “Today” show.Yes, asshat, but when your homes are covered in a bacterial sludge that could cause disease and suffering, maybe keeping them out is the right thing to do?

And MSNBC? This fucker is the top story? You people aren't journalists.

We were journalists.

Hey Edward, back in the day, you guys were speaking truth to power or so I hear.

We've got to keep banging at space, but I'm not happy with the approach. Mars is too big and too far in the future to have been announced as a goal. It's got that "we are working toward a cure for all diseases!" feel to it. Another moon walk is so 1969.

Now a reusable moon base...that I could get behind. It seems like a necessary step, and it's exciting enough to stir people up. NASA may be too ossified for the job, though.

I watched the moonwalk with my dad, too. He turned to me and said, "when you're in your twenties, you'll vacation on the moon." It all seemed so possible, considering how far we'd come in so short an amount of time.

Then we built those stupid, ugly flying buses and I knew the seventies had arrived and disco wouldn't be far behind :(

The salaries paid to these workers ended up justifying a lot of engineer types going pursuing their degrees and paying for a lot of college education for their kids.

All we hear is whining about how nobody wants to enter the sciences these days...

Should that be suprising?

Kids need inspiration. Jane Fonda's vegoil bus isn't going to inspire anyone to become an engineer or scientist.

I don't care if its Nasa, USAF, or the fucking 4H club doing it - this country needs a mission to define itself in the eyes of the world again.

An Ode to Mayor Ray Nagin

Nagin knows a truth
Say bad stuff about Bush and
Win media love

It also helps keep
People from asking questions
About your failures

Frankie says "Fly me to the moon" and whatever Frankie wants Frankie gets.

I hate Sinatra's rendition of that song. He killed it, drained the sweetness right out of it.

The man could not sing. Don't give a rat's ass about his 'way with a song.' He did things that way because he couldn't sing.

Listen, grilletta, you don't want I should be draining the sweetness right out of you, you'd better keep your musical opinions to yourself.

Capiche?

Dino, where's Lawford? Have him throw the bimbo out.

lauraw-

nice job, now he's gonna have you killed.

Zombie Sinatra is easily outrun. As long as he doesn't start singing I should be OK.

To the moon, Laura, to the moon!

I know exactly what they need to do:

They need to develop a robotic nuclear-powered smelter to melt down the silica on the Moon and create thick, powerful glass panels. Hundreds, no thousands of them. That's what we're gonna use to build the Moon Base and Moon hotels.

So let's get cracking on that. The sooner we get building materials, the sooner we get habitat.

If NASA was cool, the Atomic Energy Commission was smokin'!

What we really need is nuclear rockets. We had one ready to fly in 1973 but Dick Nixon killed it about the same time he created EPA. It was the most powerful reactor ever built, to this day.

With a nuke rocket, you can commute to the moon and cruise to Mars and back. The basic technology gave us the Pebble Bed Reactor.

I got a buddy working on the control system for it - Artifical Intelligence - "HAL, open the throttle... HAL?"

What is it you want, Mary? What do you want? You-you want the moon? Just say the word and I'll throw a lasso around it and pull it down!

Dave in Texas, my dad worked as a propulsion engineer for the Apollo program. I think he was employed by McDonald Douglas at the time. Lost his job when the space program kept getting cut (he was scheduled to work on the MOL -- Manned Orbital Laboratory). Who's going to hire a rocket scientist when there aren't any rockets to build? lol. He eventually ended up at the FAA.

You just brought up some memories for me, too...but I didn't have a crew cut. He had a flat top, tho, and he carried a pen and notebook in his shirt pocket every day until he retired. :)

Later,
bbeck

BBeck, you're bringing back memories for me. Pop was with the FAA also and he and all his friends were flattops with pocket protectors until the Beatles, when they went all hippie with facial hair and divorces.

If kids need inspiration they can get cracking on this fossil fuel thing that's been putting the bug up my ass lately. Or they can make some decent rock music or bring back Beavis and Butthead. Space is too expensive.

The plan is to hold the 2020 Republican National Covention on the...Moon!

It's true. Karl Rove wants the RNC convention right in the moonbats own backyard -- just like he did in NYC.

Reeling

(The bastards redirect the link to the album page, so you have to scroll down for the clip)

"The moon belongs to America"

Am I the last man on Earth who believes that titanium and helium-3 have MONETARY VALUE?

Taking back the moon and violating all that hopefully unenforcible "common heritage of mankind" commie crap our ambassadors signed is what it will really take to put the UN back in it's place. It'd be densely inhabited and being strip mined right now, along with Antarctica and the ocean floor, if certain late 20th century Presidents hadn't been such fucking 7th grade social studies teachers.

There's more to the moon than you know.

The dark side is where the alien base is....or so says Art Bell. We don't want to mess with aliens. Stick to the light side.