 |
| In space no one can hear the audience cheer during a debate! |
Prior Post: Can we build a robopublican animatronic conservative?
Update: Thanks Glenn Reynolds! Welcome Instapundit Readers!
Update II:
A Trip To The Moon (1902 Vintage Movie)
2001 A Space Odyssey-Monolith on the Moon
Moondance (1970)
Fly me to the moon...
Saturn V Rocket
Is he wrong?
Update III: 21st Century Space Pioneers (Libertarian Freemarket Style!) Space exploration will take off when it is profitable.
Update IV:
Julie London's fly me to the moon...
TV shows I think Newt Gingrich liked...
I'm waiting for SpaceX to team up with 6+ (I mean Seven-Up) Cola to fir some carbon black at the Moon.
ReplyDeletePiker.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious, approximately when was it that going to the Moon went from being something to be proud of achieving, to being a joke, something too ridiculous to even think seriously about anymore?
ReplyDeleteI must admit I am conflicted myself over this. The race to the moon was a great and epic endeavor. Unfortunately, it started to fall apart after that and NASA has morphed into a top heavy bureaucracy like other government bureaucracies. The concept of the United States committing to a massive spending program to fund a lunar base and a mission to Mars given our current budget woes is...out of the question right now. I would have been much more supportive of this idea if Newt had some private way of funding it (there has been long talk of a prize for a trip to Mars, similar to what was done during the age of discovery. Maybe Newt could encourage space geeks to pool money to put up a multi billion dollar prize to make that happen).
DeleteMaybe I am too jaded, but I suspect Newt was pandering for votes in Florida.
BTW CptNerd, I posted that linked video of the Saturn V rocket and the clip from The Right Stuff in response to those conflicted feelings I have (The Right Stuff was a great book and movie). I posted the other songs and movie clips just because I liked them.
DeleteAfter reading a lot of "conservative" commentary on many blogs, it's just depressing to hear the same voices I heard in the 70's dismissing the space program, mainly "it's too costly in money and lives" to go into space, "we need to solve the problems here on Earth, first." We used to dream big, and we used to "do big," often just to spite the naysayers and doom mongers who said something couldn't be done.
DeleteBut somehow we let the bureaucrats and politicians and naysayers take over the dreams, a collection of "Grima Wormtongues" whispering soft words of "take it easy", "don't rock the boat", "play it safe", weakening us like Theoden in "Lord of the Rings", making our society old before its time. I hope we can wake up as a culture, start to dream and do big again, but I'm afraid the "sensible" voices are too loud to hear above. SpaceX and Bigelow and the others might be able to prove the "too expensive" voices wrong, and start to build their own infrastructures out there, unless the FAA/NASA/EPA/DHS/NLRB bureaucrats suck the life out of the infant industries in their cradles.
It may be left to countries that are young and energetic and hopeful, like India or Brazil, to take up the flag of frontier building, of facing and facing down the future. They're likely more motivated anyway. We have more important things to do, like catch up on "Jersey Shore" and update our Facebook pages.
I do understand your frustration. But unfortunately after incurring trillions of dollars of debt over the last three years, we are in a financial hole a lot deeper than the gravity hole of earth. I want to see a Lunar base and Mars settlement happen in our lifetimes. Unfortunately we are where we are right now.
DeleteWhy that's simple CptNerd, it's when a Republican who might slow or stop the progressive movement's changes to US society has ever advocated US activity on the Moon. This gives us a good idea where Romney sits on the scale of tolerating technical changes to our environment. His sneers on this are one step short of the Deep Ecology Movement's attitudes towards technology. Which pretty much sums up the Republican establishment's as well. Not too surprising when the Deep Eeks have taken control of so much of the environmentalist movement.
ReplyDeleteRe: Moon is a Harsh Mistress movie:
ReplyDeleteJust don't let Verhooven anywhere near the script.
Or Lucas. He'll have Mike (or Mycroft) shooting first.