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View Poll Results: What do you think about NASA
NASA is the future of mankind
5
18.52%
NASA gives the Earth people huge benefits
6
22.22%
NASA is a good feeling agency that gives Americans pride
5
18.52%
NASA is a boondoggle and a waste of money
3
11.11%
NASA is run by incompetent bureaucrats
2
7.41%
NASA is just an accident waiting to happen
0
0%
NASA is dangerous to mankind
0
0%
I don't give a rat's ass about NASA
0
0%
NASA will protect Earth people from Space Invaders
NASA effectively grounds future lauches until foam problem fixed
By Robyn Shelton
Orlando Sentinel Medical Writer
Posted July 28 2005
HOUSTON -- NASA effectively grounded the space-shuttle fleet Wednesday after learning that Discovery's external fuel tank shed large pieces of potentially damaging debris during liftoff.
"Until we're ready, we won't go fly again," shuttle-program manager Bill Parsons said. "I don't know when that might be."
After a foam strike during launch doomed Columbia's final mission in 2003, engineers made eliminating the threat of hazardous debris the top priority for shuttle safety. More than two years of effort went into redesigning the 15-story tank.
Discovery's 12-day mission had been billed as a test flight to measure the effectiveness of the improved tank and other changes. However, NASA managers revealed Wednesday that chunks of foam big enough to do serious damage to the orbiter again broke free from the tank during launch.
"We decided it was safe to fly as is," Parsons said. "Obviously, with the event that we've had, we were wrong. . . ."
The largest piece, a hat-shaped object measuring more than 2 feet across at its widest point, came loose from the middle of a foam ramp on the tank's midsection. The ramp protects a liquid-hydrogen fuel line and a tray of cables from aerodynamic stress during flight.
Video captured by a camera on the tank showed the object plummet past the tail of the orbiter about two minutes after launch. Pictures of the tank's jettison in orbit taken by the crew and a camera on Discovery's belly confirmed where the piece came from.
"We think that if this had come off earlier, it would have been really bad," deputy shuttle-program manager Wayne Hale said.
NASA considered eliminating the foam ramp in the wake of the Columbia accident. However, after considerable analysis and testing, engineers decided the ramp was safe and approved leaving it on the tank for at least two more flights. Improvements already were planned, and a team was established to find alternatives to the current design.
Perhaps even more disturbing was the loss of foam from a tank area NASA had redesigned after the Columbia accident.
Engineers changed a joint on the tank's midsection by altering the way a flange is bolted on and how the foam is sprayed over it. A photograph taken from Discovery showed a 6- to 7-inch-long divot in the newly redesigned area.
That and another pocket of lost foam both were in the so-called bipod area, where a pair of metal struts connect the tank to a spot under the orbiter's nose. The foam that triggered the Columbia accident broke off a ramp in the same area. That ramp was removed when the orbiter was redesigned.
In addition to the foam issue, NASA continues to evaluate the risks posed by the loss of a small piece of the shuttle's heat-resistant tile that fell off along the edge of a door covering the nose's landing gear. The area appears to be a spot where technicians made a repair.
Fortunately for Discovery, the damage is along a seam where a pair of heat seals are underneath.
"Are we concerned about this? We're treating it very seriously," Hale said. "Are we losing sleep over this? Not yet -- we're going to continue to do the evaluation."
Engineers could get more pictures this morning for that evaluation after the international space station's two astronauts photograph the shuttle's underbelly before it docks at the outpost. The station crew was told the area should be a prime target for their photography.
Beyond the added photos, Hale said the astronauts likely will be asked to examine the door more closely with a sensor-laden boom that already has been used to scan the shuttle's wings and nose for signs of damage. In addition, NASA already has begun building a mock-up of the tile area and landing gear that can be tested.
Shuttle Discovery's crew attached the boom to the shuttle's robot arm Wednesday and performed a painstaking examination of the ship's wings and nose. Planned before launch as a new safety measure, the boom's laser survey can detect chips, gouges or other damage as small as a quarter-inch in Discovery's protective skin.
Engineers will study the data for at least a day, improving the raw footage to the point where "you will almost be able to read the serial numbers across the [shuttle's thermal] tiles," said Paul Hill, lead flight director for the mission.
At first glance, however, Hill said the scanned surfaces appear largely unblemished.
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__________________
In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
"The moment you think you got it figured...you're wrong." Mr. Rate
Last edited by wallyburger; July 29th, 2005 at 04:52 AM.
The shuttle is "right on the money" and gives the U.S. a mighty lift
Suddenly shouts rose from the hot, sunbaked desert floor in Southern California. There it was, high over the distant buttes, a tiny, gleaming dot in the pale blue sky, an apparition from space returning to earth.
Inside the cockpit, the 50-year-old commander, with glasses specially fitted into his helmet to correct the farsightedness of middle age, took over the controls for the final critical maneuvers. Expertly, the veteran pilot guided his craft through a long, easy turn. When he completed the maneuver, the ship was lined up perfectly with a runway marked in the ancient, arid bed of Rogers Dry Lake six miles away. "Right on the money, right on the money!" encouraged Mission Control.
Then John Young edged the "stick" forward, and his ship's porpoise-shaped nose dropped slightly. Plunging earthward, Columbia was falling at an angle about seven times steeper than a normal airliner's descent and was traveling half again as fast. Powerful as it had been on takeoff, the ship was now functioning as a 102-ton glider with no engine to correct its course.
At 1,800 ft. and 35 sec. from landing, Young pulled back the stick to check his dive. Only Columbia's stubby wings and slightly flared underbelly were giving it lift. But, to his delight, he found the craft far more aerodynamically buoyant than expected. Nineteen seconds before landing, he dropped his wheels.
"Gear down," reported a chase jet, buzzing alongside and counting off the altitude: "50 feet . . . 40 . . . 5—4—3—2—1—Touchdown!" As its rear wheels made contact, the flight director in far-off Houston told his tense crew: "Prepare for exhilaration." Nine seconds later, the nose wheels were down too. Columbia settled softly onto the lake bed. Young had floated the shuttle along 3,000 ft. beyond the planned landing spot, able to use its surprising lift to make a notably smooth touchdown. As it rolled to a stop through the shimmering desert air, The Star-Spangled Banner rattled forth from hundreds of portable radios tuned to a local station. From Mission Control in Houston's Johnson Space Center came an exuberant "Welcome home, Columbia. Beautiful. Beautiful."
So it was: simple and flawless, almost as if it had been performed countless times before. Yet the picture-perfect landing on California's Mojave Desert last week all but obscured the historic nature of those last, breathtaking moments of Columbia's 54½-hr. odyssey. Gone were the great parachutes and swinging capsules of earlier space missions, splashing into the sea, never to travel into space again. For the first time, a man-made machine had returned from the heavens like an ordinary airplane—in fact, far more smoothly than many a commercial jet. So long delayed so widely criticized, Columbia's flight should finally put to rest any doubts that there will one day be regular commuter runs into the cosmos.
In the astonishing complexity of the craft's design, in its peerless performance certainly in the cool performance of its astronauts—possessors of what Tom Wolfe calls "the right stuff"—Columbia was a much needed reaffirmation of U.S. technological prowess. It came at a moment when many Americans, and much of the world as well, were questioning that very capability.
The doubts grew out of a succession of U.S. setbacks: from the defeat in Viet Nam to the downed rescue helicopters in the Iranian desert, from the debacle of Three Mile Island to Detroit's apparent defenselessness against the onslaught of Japanese cars. The flaming power of Columbia's rockets seemed to lift Americans out of their collective sense of futility and gloom. At last they had a few things to cheer: an extraordinary spacecraft—the most daring flying machine ever built—and two brave and skilled men at its helm. As President Reagan told the astronauts, "Through you, we feel as giants once again."
Jubilant giants, at that. "The shuttle will become the DC-3 of space," exulted veteran Astronaut Deke Slayton, boss of orbital flight-test crews, referring to the sturdy Douglas aircraft that opened new routes for commercial aviation in the mid-1930s. Columbia's maiden space voyage brought to mind the first flight of Orville and Wilbur Wright at Kitty Hawk, Lindbergh's lone-eagle crossing of the Atlantic, even the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, which would turn a land of remote frontiers into a nation. Princeton's prophet of space colonization, Physicist Gerard O'Neill, saw the flight as a first step toward establishing mining facilities on the moon. Still others spoke of the shuttle's potential role in scientific research, in space manufacturing, in the eventual tapping of solar energy in orbit, in controlling the new "high ground" of space against Soviet incursion.
From the instant of Columbia's touchdown, a moment watched by tens of millions of television viewers in the U.S. and perhaps hundreds of millions more round the world, Americans seemed to go into orbit themselves. "Terrific!" shouted Dennis O'Connell, a truck driver from Queens, N.Y., as he paused in a Manhattan pub to watch the landing. "It shows everybody we're still No. 1." Mrs. Alicia Hoerter, a Louisville grandmother, could barely contain her excitement or her puns. "Columbia, the gem of a notion!" she exulted. "First, it's a rocket, then it's a spaceship, then it's a plane." In a packed Georgia Tech ballroom, great whoops of joy went up when John Young, class of '52, put Columbia down on the desert floor, and a band struck up "I'm a ramblin' wreck from Georgia Tech."
Not since the first landing of men on the moon had the nation shown such enthusiastic interest in space. Teachers interrupted classes so youngsters could see the landing. Work in offices and factories virtually ceased. Hearing that Columbia was about to touch down, a fitter in a Manhattan men's shop dashed off to the nearest TV set, leaving a customer standing before a mirror all pinned up in an unfinished suit. The Atlanta Constitution's resident cartoonist, Baldy, showed a beaming Uncle Sam emerging out of the shuttle with his arms raised high like a victorious boxer's. Though some editorial writers expressed discomfort about the shuttle's military role, others dismissed such fears. Commented the Chicago Tribune: "It appears we will get into a space arms race whether we like it or not . . . So fly aloft, Columbia!; deliver your laser guns and satellite busters and spy eyes. Build your battlestars. May the Force be with us."
All but forgotten amid America's sudden love affair with the shuttle were its $9.9 billion price tag (at a 30% cost overrun), all those loose tiles, the exploding engines, even the last-minute computer failure, to say nothing of the inevitable jokes about America's "space lemon" and "flying brickyard." Could past scorn actually have increased the passion of this new embrace? The shuttle had become a kind of technological Rocky, the bum who perseveres to the end, the underdog who finally wins. Columbia's success, explained Milwaukee Sociologist Wayne Youngquist, "ties in with so many of our cultural themes. It's Horatio Alger. It's The Little Engine That Could."
Perhaps. But the infatuation also had a boisterous, abrasive, decidedly chauvinistic tone. Out in the desert, many among the nearly one-quarter of a million people who had gathered to welcome the shuttle home sported T shirts emblazoned EAT YOUR HEARTS OUT, RUSSIANS. In a New York bar, after watching the landing, a patron boasted: "The French and the Brits can't do anything like that. Neither can the Russkis."
The French and the British, not to mention the Germans and Japanese, were not about to disagree. In London, the mass-circulation dailies exploded in a chorus of adulation. FANTASTIC! exclaimed the Daily Mail, wow! trumpeted Rupert Murdoch's Sun. Most Britons, rather than showing concern over the shuttle's military potential, seemed to welcome it. Said the London Times: "The conquest of space is both a necessary expression of man's drive to explore and understand his environment and a military requirement if the West is not to be dominated by Soviet activity in space."
The West Germans had special reason to celebrate. They are the prime builders of Europe's main contribution to the shuttle program: the Spacelab, a self-contained scientific compartment for up to four experimenters scheduled to be car ried aloft in 1983. Said one official: "Success for America means a breakthrough for us too and signals the entry of Western Europe into aerospace." The French, who are building a conventional rocket launcher called Ariane, which could draw away some of the shuttle's business, were no less effusive. Said Le Figaro: "After their political and military failures of recent years, our friends [the Americans] needed a big technological success. And they've got one." The French public wanted to share that success. During the very hour of Columbia's homecoming, France's government-run television was to air a required, equal-time political broadcast for the April 26 presidential balloting. But viewers protested so vociferously that only twelve minutes before touchdown, France's election commission scrubbed the broadcast with the candidates' belated assent, and the French got to see le shuttle's return. "Reason," intoned Le Figaro, "triumphed at the last moment."
For Japanese televiewers, the landing occurred in the early hours before dawn, local time. But in a country that both admires and competes with American technology, some 2 million households tuned in for the event. In his message of congratulations to the U.S., Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki said of the shuttle: "It is the crystallization of your nation's highly developed technologies and scientific achievements and symbolizes the beginning of an 'American renewal.' "
The Soviets, again, complained that the shuttle is mainly a military vehicle. But they did show 30 seconds of the landing on televison. Chinese Communist newspapers, though fascinated by the idea of products labeled "made in space," excoriated both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. for casting a "shadow of war" over space.
Parked on the desert, Columbia had a decidedly unwarlike look. It survived its journey in remarkably fine style. A dozen or so of its 31,000 heat-shielding tiles had come unstuck during the thunderous ascent. But during its glowing, 2,700° F plunge through the atmosphere, a maneuver that has been likened to riding inside a meteor, not one was lost from the craft's underbelly. Only a few tiles were gouged and chipped, apparently by pebbles and other desert debris kicked up by the wheels after touchdown. After an initial going-over at Edwards Air Force Base, the shuttle will be placed atop a modified Boeing 747 for a slow, two-day piggyback return to Cape Canaveral, where the ship will be refitted for a second launch, probably in September. The astronauts will be Joe Engle, 48, and Richard Truly, 43, this mission's back-up crew.
They can hardly outdo Young, who has now made five space flights, including a moon landing, and his rookie pilot, Bob Crippen, 43. Though their lift-off was delayed two days because of that computer failure, once they settled into the cockpit for the second try, everything went, well, like a rocket. Barely 45 min. off the launch pad, Columbia was circling the earth at an altitude of 150 miles. Before the end of the day it reached 170 miles. Meanwhile, two vessels steamed out to recover the 80-ton shells of two spent solid-fuel rockets that had parachuted into the Atlantic. When a nosey Soviet "trawler" edged into the site, the Coast Guard vessel Steadfast had to warn it off, then actually block its path, before the Russians backed off. The steel rocket frames were burned and bent a bit, but can probably be overhauled and refilled for another shot.
As always, there was in-flight banter between the astronauts and the Houston control center. When Crippen felt Houston was loading him with too many tasks at one time—realigning the inertial navigational unit, shooting a picture of the Southern Lights, confirming a message on the teletype—he asked in mock seriousness: "You mean all that right now?" To jog the astronauts awake, Houston piped in a loud country and western ditty about the shuttle called The Mean Machine. There was a somewhat more serious moment when Vice President Bush got on the radio from Washington to congratulate them on behalf of the nation.
There were also a few mi nor glitches. During the first "night" in space—actually they saw the sun rise and set once during every 90-min. orbit—Young and Crippen complained about a chill in the cabin. The temperature had drooped to 37° F. "I was ready to break out the long undies," joked one of the frozen astronauts. The problem was quickly fixed with a signal from earth that pumped warm water into the cabin's temperature control system. Young and Crippen had less luck fixing a faulty flight data recorder that had stopped mysteriously. They tried to get to it with a screwdriver but found the panel over it had been too tightly screwed down (or "torqued," as NASA put it).
The most serious problem came on the second night when an alarm light flashed and a bell jolted Young and Crippen out of their reveries. It was a warning of a malfunction in a heating unit on one of the three auxiliary power units for Columbia's hydraulic systems, which control the landing gear and elevens. The heater keeps the unit's fuel from freezing up. A throw of a switch got it working again, but Columbia is such a masterpiece of engineering redundancy that any one of the units could have saved the day. Said Flight Director Neil Hutchinson: "It's absolutely amazing. We didn't have anything that is a show stopper."
The real "show stopper," of course, might have been the landing. But it was breathtakingly "nominal," NASA lingo for "perfect." Crossing the coast below Big Sur at Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound, or about 5,100 m.p.h., Crippen crowed: "What a way to come to California!" Young lost his cool only after he had artfully landed Columbia right on the runway's center line. Eager to make an exit, he urged Houston to get the reception crews to speed up their "sniffing" chores—ridding the ship of noxious gases with exhausts and fans. When he was finally allowed to emerge, 63 min. after touchdown, he bounded down the stairs, checked out the tiles and landing gear, then jubilantly jabbed the air with his fists. It was probably Young's most uncontrolled move of the entire flight.
Curiously, Young's and Crippen's heartbeat patterns reversed on takeoff and landing. Both are normally in the 60s. At launch Young's rose only to 85 beats a minute, while Crippen's soared to 135. Returning, Young's pulse rate zipped up to 130 as he flew the craft in. Crippen's stayed around 85.
To be sure, Young's racing pulse slowed down soon after landing—and the nation's is likely to do the same. Says Forrest Berghorn, a political scientist at the University of Kansas: "The American spirit is too self-centered to concern itself with this for very long. The space shuttle success is in a class with our hockey victory over Russia." That may be too harsh a judgment; of late there have been signs of a renewed popular interest in space. Yet even those who want a redoubled U.S. space effort doubt there will be a lasting effect from the flight unless a profound change of mood occurs in budget-minded Washington. Says Jerry Grey, public policy administrator for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics: "Right now, there is no real commitment to space, no strong proponent of it within the Administration."
There is no doubt of continued military interest in the shuttle. But in the realms of pure science and commercial enterprise, the future of the costly space shuttle seems far from assured.
In its struggle to get the shuttle launched, NASA has already been forced to drain funds from other areas, especially those concerned with the unmanned exploration of the solar system. To NASA's great embarrassment, it has had to drop out of a joint effort to position two satellites—one American, the other European—in great, looping orbits around the poles of the sun. These solar regions have never before been inspected by technically equipped robots from earth, and such satellites could help answer important questions about the behavior of our parent star: How does it affect terrestrial climate and weather? Is it warming up or cooling off?
The space agency has also been forced to delay until 1988 a project to orbit Venus with a satellite that will scan its cloud-veiled surface with radar beams. In 1986, Halley's comet, perhaps a chunk of debris left over from the early solar system, will return to the earth's vicinity for the first time since 1910. So far the space agency has been unable to scratch up the money for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to intercept this visitor from deep space with cameras and other scientific instruments. Says George Rathjens, former chief scientist at the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency: "Space science is in shambles. Planetary exploration is in shambles." Indeed, because of shuttle costs, NASA is so strapped that there is only one planetary exploration it can be sure of—and that the budget cutters cannot call off: Voyager 2, launched 3½ years ago and still speeding toward an August rendezvous with Saturn and its moons.
Though the shuttle's cost overruns have caused penny pinching on other scientific projects, the future in space should now brighten for scientists, even if their experiments must ride on military flights. In 1985, the shuttle is scheduled to hoist a large, remote-controlled telescope into orbit high above the earth's obscuring atmosphere. From there, astronomers should be able to see out 14 billion light-years (seven times farther than they can see using the biggest earthbound reflectors), expanding the volume of the known universe about 350-fold and bringing them very close to what is presumed to be its "edge." Says Physicist Robert Jastrow (God and the Astronomers): "We don't know what we'll find out there, whose hand we'll see at work." Also in 1985, the shuttle is slated to get the Galileo spacecraft on its way: an unmanned package of instruments that will drop a probe into the atmosphere of Jupiter in search of organic molecules, the building blocks of life. Adds Jastrow: "The two great cosmic mysteries are the origin of the universe and the origin of life. The shuttle will give us a chance to probe both."
It will also enable scientists to perform more mundane research, like that planned for Spacelab. Among them: investigations into the behavior of metals, chemicals and even living cells in what scientists call the microgravity of orbit, the familiar condition of weightlessness. Some student experiments will be carried up as well, probably as part of NASA'S so-called getaway specials, compact canisters as small as 1.5 cu. ft. that can be placed on a flight for as little as $3,000. One young man recently announced he intended to use such an experimental package to see if fruit flies breed in space. What will be next?
No less intriguing but so far less precise are the shuttle's commercial possibilities. It is a working truck with a 65,000-lb. payload, but who is going to buy space in it? Communications companies, for one, are already lined up to use the shuttle for satellite launches. One advantage is price: $35 million for a shuttle launch vs. $48 million for a boost into space from a conventional Atlas-Centaur rocket. Another is that the shuttle can carry several satellites at a time. What is more, says A T & T 's Robert Latter, "you can test the satellite all the way up. Maybe you could even fix it in flight." After the astronauts perfect their skills at retrieving satellites with the shuttle's big mechanical arm, ailing "birds" may also be recovered and repaired either in orbit or on the ground.
An early operational flight of the shuttle, in 1983, is scheduled to carry a tracking and data relay satellite aloft for the Space Communications Co. AT&T is planning to use a 1984 flight to put one of its new Telstar 3 satellites into orbit. Foreign nations have rented a total of 18 payloads, among them: an Arab consortium, Australia, Canada, China, Colombia, Great Britain, Japan and Luxembourg. Other potential users of shuttle space have been slower to come forward, in part because the idea of working in orbit is still a bit too risky and futuristic for most corporate chiefs to contemplate. But there is little doubt that microgravity and the "hard" vacuum of space offer unique opportunities for research and development. One idea that will be tested jointly in space by McDonnell Douglas and Ortho Pharmaceutical is a procedure for separating biological materials through electrophoresis, a process whereby substances move under the influence of electric fields. The object: to isolate hormones, enzymes, proteins and certain cells in higher and purer concentrations than can be achieved under the influence of gravity.
Still other companies are considering the use of space to grow crystals for the manufacture of electronic "chips," the tiny semiconductor wafers that are at the heart of modern electronics. Space-made crystals, say the experts, could be larger and more uniform than those made on earth. Other possible orbital products: high-purity glass, new alloys, higher-yield vaccines. Says Jerry Grey: "These aren't future technologies. They can be used today." Adds Merrill Lynch Analyst Ed Greenslet: "The important thing is that the shuttle is now there. Things that are there often start people thinking and evaluating what could and should be done with them."
If commercial clients sign up in sufficient numbers, NASA plans to fly more than 400 shuttle missions in the next ten years. It has even considered subcontracting shuttle operations to an airline, and United Airlines has expressed interest. Farsighted planners are thinking about more ambitious roles for the shuttle, or its successor. In the future, such a spacecraft may carry work crews into orbit, where they will be left behind inside comfortable modules that could serve as building blocks for permanent space stations. As more components are shuttled up, these centers might begin to produce space goods, perhaps even utilize raw materials, as Gerard O'Neill suggests, from the moon or from asteroids. There would be no shortage of power for such enterprises; energy would come from the sun.
In the more distant future, such stations, like the great wheel in 2001: A Space Odyssey, could serve as a launch pad for journeys far beyond the earth, maybe to Mars. Interplanetary spacecraft assembled in earth orbit could be made of much lighter and less costly materials since they would not have to survive the stresses and friction of travel through the earth's atmosphere.
Even in the excited aftermath of Columbia's incredible journey, such schemes have the ring of expensive fantasy. Some people even find them disturbing retreats from the earth's own hard realities, including widespread poverty and hunger. But are they really only escapist dreams? At least one hard-nosed test pilot does not think so. Speaking after his return from space last week, John Young said: "I think we have a remarkable capability here. We're really not too far—the human race isn't far from going to the stars. Bob and I are mighty proud to have been a part of that evolution."
Oh - the lame retort of small Governmenters - without realizing that most, if not all of the major technological breakthroughs of the past 75 years were either totally, or mostly Government-funded. The risk/reward of ground-breaking technology means that private funding is not available.
Oh - the lame retort of small Governmenters - without realizing that most, if not all of the major technological breakthroughs of the past 75 years were either totally, or mostly Government-funded. The risk/reward of ground-breaking technology means that private funding is not available.
Astute observation Jon. There are a lot of commercially available items today that are the direct result of research due to our space program. Not only that, but every dime spent on this program goes to Americans in the form of wages and dollars to suppliers of the equipment needed. This is the one government program that truly is for Americans and by Americans.
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“So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldn’t find honest employment.” —Mark Twain
Astute observation Jon. There are a lot of commercially available items today that are the direct result of research due to our space program. Not only that, but every dime spent on this program goes to Americans in the form of wages and dollars to suppliers of the equipment needed. This is the one government program that truly is for Americans and by Americans.
That is also one of the benefits of military spending - a lot of breakthroughs came from the trillions spent on defense - heck, the internet was a government/military/scientific creation.
Oh - the lame retort of small Governmenters - without realizing that most, if not all of the major technological breakthroughs of the past 75 years were either totally, or mostly Government-funded. The risk/reward of ground-breaking technology means that private funding is not available.
__________________
We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.
That is also one of the benefits of military spending - a lot of breakthroughs came from the trillions spent on defense - heck, the internet was a government/military/scientific creation.
Al Gore????
__________________
In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
"The moment you think you got it figured...you're wrong." Mr. Rate
Oh - the lame retort of small Governmenters - without realizing that most, if not all of the major technological breakthroughs of the past 75 years were either totally, or mostly Government-funded. The risk/reward of ground-breaking technology means that private funding is not available.
Well when government takes the funds by force and then doles them back out what do you expect? Of course advances are going to be government-funded.
Government stiffles innovation and technology AT LEAST as much as it helps, probably more.
I like the space program. I like the advances in technology that have trickled down to the average person.
I don't like the undeniable fact that NASA is a wasteful buearucracy and that government funding interjects politics into science and technology.
__________________
“votes are collared under democracy, not by talking sense but by talking nonsense.” ~H. L. Mencken
That is also one of the benefits of military spending - a lot of breakthroughs came from the trillions spent on defense - heck, the internet was a government/military/scientific creation.
Not entirely true Jon.
The Government may have planted the seed for the internet but it was a backwater and not very useful until individuals and private enterprise got involved.
__________________
“votes are collared under democracy, not by talking sense but by talking nonsense.” ~H. L. Mencken
The Government may have planted the seed for the internet but it was a backwater and not very useful until individuals and private enterprise got involved.
All of the resources, the backbone, the research for the internet was done by the military and government funded scientific grants. Now the full application was expanded by private individuals/corporation, but without the billions spent and the 30 years spent by the government, there would not have been the infrastructure to piggyback on.
Just think of FedEx - great idea, very successful. But if the infrastructure (i.e. government built airports) did not exist, it would have never worked.
