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On the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing I ask the question - Is NASA a giant waste of money? Are we investing in the future of mankind? Should we be spending money on space exploration or is the money better used here on earth?
Sometimes I feel both sides are right. What do you think?
None of the above. It was pure science, and pure science is getting very expensive. Only the government and the big corporations have the funds to pay the high cost. Proctor and Gamble have no profit motive for knowing what is on the other side of the moon, so that left only the government with deep enough pockets to continue the thirst for knowledge.
NASA's '09 budget is 17.6 billion. We can save that by bringing the troops home from Iraq ten weeks early. Or getting somebody else besides Halliburton to feed them.
But it's all borrowed money from Chinese loan sharks, about $3 per week from each household's budget, not counting the compounded interest that their grandchildren will have to pay off.
On the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing I ask the question - Is NASA a giant waste of money? Are we investing in the future of mankind? Should we be spending money on space exploration or is the money better used here on earth?
Sometimes I feel both sides are right. What do you think?
We sent men to the moon in 1969. Why do we keep going up if we haven't gone further in 40 years with manned space flights? It seems to me it's being milked without much progress. I could be wrong.
Eventually Earth will be uninhabitable. The sun will run out of fuel, an asteroid will plow into us, solar flares will destroy everything or we will pollute the earth so much we cant live here. Sure this may be 2 million or even 2 billion years off but what then? We will hopefully have found another habitable planet by then. I dont think we can do that without space programs.
Eventually Earth will be uninhabitable. The sun will run out of fuel, an asteroid will plow into us, solar flares will destroy everything or we will pollute the earth so much we cant live here. Sure this may be 2 million or even 2 billion years off but what then? We will hopefully have found another habitable planet by then. I dont think we can do that without space programs.
I agree, we all know what happens when you procrastinate. "If you wait till the last minute it only takes a minute to do." will not work if we have to emergency relocate the human race. I know it sounds science fiction, but you cannot deny that we work better when trying to achieve near impossible goals. How many engineers do we have because they grew up worshipping astronauts? One more here at least.
We will hopefully have found another habitable planet by then. .
I think the rest of the universe rather hopes we don't. There is a reason why we keep live virus pathogens under lock and key. Once they get loose from their isolation, the results are not pretty.
But it is only natural that we think we are important and valuable enough to be perpetuated, and we have created NASA as a backup.
NASA is an inefficient bureaucracy and hasn't done nearly as much as it could to increase our knowledge and presence in space. The federal government hasn't given NASA anywhere near the amount of resources they need either.
Our current global society needs to be able to expand to perpetuate itself, and the only place to expand into is space. If we don't, our world will run out of resources and society will collapse well before the sun dies.
We need to figure out how to live out there now, while we still have the resources and knowledge to do so. It will be too late when we are thrust back into the stone age or disappear as a species all together.
Perhaps we should be concentrating on cleaning up all the space junk and pollution that is orbiting the earth before we head out polluting the rest of the universe. Perhaps we need to make room in NASA's budget for cleanup missions. Maybe we should send up some shuttle missions to pick up garbage and bring it back to earth or collect tons of this stuff and put it aboard a robotic space craft and fly it into the sun. NASA should be held accountable for all the polluting it has been doing for the past 50 years; everyone else here on earth is. When you hear about having to move satelites into higher or lower orbits to keep from being hit by debris there is clearly a problem that needs to be addressed that, as far as I can tell, isn't.
The US won the space race, we made it to the moon first. There is nothing else to prove. Let other nations start putting money into a joint program like the space station if we want to go back to the moon or beyond. There is no reason why the US taxpayer should have to shoulder the burden completely. We will surely share any innovations or advances in technology with the world anyway; why not have them help pay for it?
If you are concerned about moving people off the earth then the moon makes more sense than Mars. 200K miles and 3 days as compared to several million and minimum 180 days to start. Prove we can colonize the moon before the grandiose plans of Mars. Many of the people doing the talking are former astronauts that are not concerned about living and colonizing but just the pure excitement of exploration. While there is a need for these type of people, there is also a need to think beyond that momentary thrill.
If we, as a race, muck up our planet so much that it will not sustain us, why should we go and do the same to another one?
Wouldn't it be great if when we got there, they didn't want us and started shooting. Don't forget that we would be the aliens and we all know from the comics that aliens are weird, horrid creatures. It would serve us right!
Yes, I think we could find a better use for our tax dollars. The Space program has given us Tang and Teflon, both of which we might have developed without the trillons of dollars wasted.
If we, as a race, muck up our planet so much that it will not sustain us, why should we go and do the same to another one?
I disagree, I am interested in our survival no matter what. If you had to chop down a tree to avoid starving to death, rest assured, you would do it.
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Wouldn't it be great if when we got there, they didn't want us and started shooting. Don't forget that we would be the aliens and we all know from the comics that aliens are weird, horrid creatures. It would serve us right!
If we were talking about any planets within a couple years travel to reach (even with light speed capabilities), there are no life forms there to tread on.
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Yes, I think we could find a better use for our tax dollars. The Space program has given us Tang and Teflon, both of which we might have developed without the trillons of dollars wasted.
It has given us much more, and many of the things would not have been developed because they are developed for some wild space application at a pretty wild price tag, then later realized potential and previous development makes it able to be developed for earthbound application.
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