I caught the movie Gravity the other night on HBO. It was actually pretty good tho’ you have to suspend disbelief. C’mon, a mission specialist being able to fly a Soyuz space capsule? Using a fire extinguisher as a propulsion device? I will say the special effects are pretty good, but they blew it on her hair. Even hair that short would be flyaway in zero G. Sandra Bullock looks pretty good for 50-years-old. But that’s not the point of this post.
WTF are we still doing in low earth orbit anyway? Where is the space station they had in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Geez! We went from the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk to the moon in less than 70 years. When man walked on the moon it was easy to envision a space station and a colony on the moon in the near future. Remember the cheesy Brit series Space 1999? Instead, what do we have now? We have the ISS in low earth orbit that we’ll eventually have to crash into the ocean. We built a fleet of reusable space shuttles, but they were only low orbit vehicles. We’re a long way from the vision of Clarke and Kubrick in 2001, but in 1967, seeing all the progress we had made in less than 70 years it appeared to be feasible. Instead, 45 years later, there is no space station in a high stable orbit.
The Apollo missions were fantastic and good PR but what did they really accomplish? Werhner von Braun was against the way we went to the moon. He envisioned a rotating space station in a stable orbit, like in 2001, and from there we would assemble the vehicles to take us to the moon. This would have given us a permanent presence in space. This would have also positioned us to further explorations of the solar system. Instead, we raced to the moon and beat the Rooskies there and for all intents and purposes stopped. The last few Apollo missions were even cancelled.
And then there were the civil rights leaders who showed up at the moon shot at Cape Canaveral with their stupid mule drawn cart insisting that we spend money “solving the problems here on Earth”. Since then, we’ve spent trillions of dollars “solving the problems here on Earth” with LBJ’s Great Fucking Society. What do we have to show for that? We have a permanent underclass of people dependent upon gummint for all of their needs. The Dimocrat Party, along with many Republicans, have kept them poor and uneducated with no ambition or no desire to better themselves other than being professional athletes, rappers, drug dealers, or pimps. Why work when everything is given to you? Low income people can make more money relying on poverty programs instead of working. Why show any responsibility? Keep having kids you can’t afford because with each kid comes more money. Why get married? You make more money without a father in the house. Our poor live better than the majority of people in Africa or Asia yet they still bitch that we do not give them enough money. It’s greedy for me to spend my money on myself but it’s not greedy for them to demand that I support them. Leeches! Parasites! I don’t mind helping people who need help. I resent giving money to people who won’t help better themselves. Now, we’re supposed to take care of the people flooding our borders. When will this shit stop?
We had a grand opportunity to continue the advancement of mankind, the “one giant leap for mankind” in the immortal words of Neil Armstrong. The shuttle was a great engineering feat but did it get us off the planet? We needed a vehicle to get us up to a high sustainable earth orbit, just like Werhner von Braun wanted, not a piddling 200 miles up. And then the follow on vehicle was canceled. NASA, which took us to the moon, is now dependent upon the Rooskies to get our astronauts up to the ISS. We went to the moon and now we can no longer even get to low earth orbit. WTF? Our current president has redefined NASA’s mission as Mooslime outreach. What does that have to do with space exploration? Making 7th Century barbarian savages feel good about themselves? That is NASA’s mission? Of course, we also have to value Diversity (All Hail Diversity!) which means NASA has also had to hire a lot of unqualified blacks since the Apollo missions.
We walked on the moon. Now we can only look at it. We took the trillions of dollars we could have spent to advance humanity and squandered it to make our social safety net into a hammock for lazy leeches and parasites.
Maybe the Chinese will allow us to visit their permanent moon base after they build it. Of course, we’ll have to hitch a ride on their vehicles. But we did value Diversity (All Hail Diversity!) and waste trillions of dollars trying to solve “the problems here on Earth”. Plus we elected a black president from a Third World country. That’s more important than human progress.
Actually, the space shuttle was only a part of the original Space Transportation System. The planned 25 shuttles (amortizing the R&D over them) would launch monthly to a permanent orbiting station. The Space Tug would take things to geosynchronous or other high orbit. Another would take from there to the moon. And the shuttles would use entirely reusable hardware.
Of course, Congress (if “pro” and “con” are opposites, what is the opposite of progress?) strangled all but five shuttles. The Interim Upper Stage, meant to fill in until the space tug flew, suddenly became the Inertial Upper Stage which was itself cancelled. And the ability to use the shuttle for trans low earth orbit went away. Along with much of the reusable hardware.
The result of the lack of economy of production and stretching the hardware over 30 years was that each shuttle launch cost more than paying the enormous Soviet (er, sorry, Russian) launch fees, at least in nominal US dollars. But just as the Saturn V tooling was scrapped (as was that of the SR-71), F-22 and B-2 bomber numbers reduced to a tiny fraction of plans and so on, I suspect the promised Orion capsules and Space Launch System boosters will suffer a similar fate of strangulation followed by the naysayers deriding how much they cost each. Some things never change…
I’d sure feel alot better about writting that check to NASA rather than the IRS!
The best part of the movie was George Libtard Clooney flying off into space.
That was enjoyable watching George float away.
The only reason NASA exists now is to forward the hoax of AGW. Spacex can handle the launches, not Russia.
Space exploration can be postponed until we’re not $17 trillion in debt.
We don’t have hardly ANY of the technologic googaws and whizbangs promised us in the 60’s. There are a variety of reasons for that some of them
being technological….as in we still don’t have any truly viable power sources that are both portable and massive. We are still stuck with chemical energy in
liquid/compressed forms like gasoline/diesel or rocket fuel. Both of which are
adequate for short distances before the need for refueling but not for truly LONG distance travel.
The main reason aside from actual physics however is the “great society” experiment the LBJ foisted on us where he, his associates and subsequent
groups of liberal progtards stole truly MASSIVE amounts of capital from the
productive sector of society to give to useless oxygen thieves who have never and will never amount to anything even as useful as a pile of manure.
When you bl0w your working capital on pie in the sky social schemes you don’t get productive results…..you get massive piles of welfare dependent slugs sucking the lifeblood out of a society. America is now a hollow husk, a shell of it’s former greatness and the welfare liberal progtard agenda is the cause.
The special effects reminded me of 2001, but I liked 2001 better; it had a plot.
Hey Denny’
I saw some of your other readers already touched on it with the diversity outreach. NASA used to be a merit based organization….until 1972 when diversity was prized above merit.
We had wasted 17 trillion dollars on the freeloader class…money that could have spent on space stations and research…instead it was used to….create more freeloaders. and keep the democrats in power. Now we will pay others to take our astronauts to space. And I don’t think we will be able to do anything…we have lost the skills necessary to build complicated machinery. We don’t have the manufacturing base anymore…We have factories shutting down and moving to avoid the draconian EPA mandates. We have to hire foreigners for the tech jobs since our schools teach feel good crap instead of actual skill sets for a “real job”…Dang, I could go on a full page rant on this one…..
America is like Austin Powers. Dr Evil Obama has stolen our Mojo. Just like the time Dr Evil Carter did in an earlier time. We will need another leader like Ronald Reagan to recover our MOJO. That and we will need swing the pendulum way back in the other direction vis a vie personal responsibility and productivity. Once the boot of liberal progressivism is off our necks we have a good chance to regain our lost MOJO. If the gimme free shit folks elect a Clinton type we better start learning the metric system and studying cantonese, or the next footprints on the moon will be a size 6.
How about the world’s producers joined together to establish free and independent settlements of, by, and for themselves throughout our solar system, leaving all the moochers behind on Earth to cannibalize each other into total primitiveness or extinction? Then their descendants, after a few hundred years or so, could land en masse and form a more perfect civilization here, too, with little if any effective resistance.
Like what our forefathers did on this continent, sans the initial royal colonialism and conflicts with indigenous populations. Although the mooching probably would have to become even more intolerable for producers than it is now before they start seeing that as their only viable option.
Sounds like Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
The trouble is the producers create a society, like the US but then the moochers come along and aided by the looters take it over. That’s what has happened here in the United States. Of course they play on our heart strings. How can such a rich country not take care of the less fortunate among us. Or, it’s for the poor innocent children.
That would only work if they nuked the planet from orbit. Any population center with more than a few hundred life forms would be hit. The last thing you would want would be any of the moocher spoor surviving. Of course if we leave, the Chinese will clean up our mess. There are still a lot of natural resources left for them to plunder. They could always enslave any survivors of their takeover to mine all of our coal and pump out the oil. The thought of an ex-EPA greenie working on a drill rig at the point of a bayonet makes me smile.