Where to start with NASA? Seems to me our country no longer produces or encourages us to be the best and brightest. It is not fair your son or daughter made the honor roll and mine did not. We need to stop keeping score in our children's athletics. Sound familar? We graduate one engineer for every 1,743 lawyers. Sound productive? Other competing countries (Japan, China, India) it is completley the opposite. NASA is promoting too much political garbage lately with the help of Al Gore. The moment we think we can control the weather, please email myself. One volcano does more damage to the enviroment then all of man can do in their lifetime. The largest pollutor of oil isnt Exxon, its mother earth herself, bubbling up all around the ocean bed. And she cleans up after herself and us rather nicely. NASA no longer has any goals. People talk about going to Mars. America, sadly, will not be have the first human on Mars. I look to China or Russia. The main reason is we can land on Mars, we just can't get back home. It would be a one way ticket, I don't believe Americans are that nuts. So what to do with NASA? i sure love the photos the Hubble puts out. I think that is getting moth balled in a year or so. I can't wait to see its replacement. NASA has served its purpose and could continue to track space junk and shoot the occasional probe, and a few hundred barrels of nuclear waste to the sun every year. Otherwise, It is time for private enterprise to resume its roll and cheaply launch satellites.
http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=28950029
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zeta1983-1
16 years ago
If your asking about conspirascies with your mention of Hogland then yes I do think NASA is hiding something. Even Apollo astronaunts and space shuttle crews have seen UFO. Look up info on cities found on the moon Nasa has been covering up. It's not just a few blurry photos there are some pretty good pictures of large towers and other structures on the moon.
As for NASA itself it definately could be doing way more. First off by being less secretive and second by setting some more definate goals. I'm sure when the Apollo 17 astronaunts left the moon they didn't think they'd go to their graves still being the last people on the moon. It's a shame but we probably won't be back on the moon until 2020 and probably no Mars landings any sooner than 2050 unless there is a major breakthrough in technology, which is actually not too inconceivable. It's sad had we kept up the 1960s pace we could have been colonizing the moon by the 1980s and probably have landed on Mars before 2000. I doubt we'll ever get the full truth about what is found there however. Our best hope is for the private industry. Once things like asteroid mining and mining the moon become profitable and achieveable is when the space age will truely begin.
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tody711
16 years ago
Totally agree. The best and the brightest are being ignored under the "Leave no child behind" decree. It is better in the PC world to dumb down the brightest and pull the ignorant up a bit. Look to other countries for future space exploration. NASA is but a shell of a once glorious institution. A big shame. Soon the US will have to rely on Russia to get people/supplies to the space station. But that too will soon rot and fall from the sky. NASA and the US have lost their cajonies, are too afraid of failure vs victory. The shuttle is old and unreliable, on its last wings, with nothing to take its place.
Where is Homer Hickam when you need him?
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dawgpoundjohn
16 years ago
Tody, you wrote, "It is better in the PC world to dumb down the brightest and pull the ignorant up a bit."
I think it should be, "It is easier in the PC world to dumb down the brightest than to educate the ignorant up a bit."
Dumbing-down the population - the PC solution to ALL problems. And these are the people stressing education ONLY when elections are approaching! Don't believe them. They want to keep you dumb and dependant upon them.
This movie is a great example of a group of young people learning on their own in order to get out of a bad situation. No government-sponsored programs were used by them. They went to their teacher, a coalmine machinist, and each other. They had a dream and despite opposition by Homer's father (don't know about the others' parents), they realized their dreams.
GREAT MOVIE!!!!
BTW, for those who subscribe to the "we never went to the moon" conspiracy theory, how the hell can you explain how NOBODY in NASA hasn't come forward yet? Do you really think that ALL OF NASA was in on it? Here's an experiment for you: get you and four buddies to rob a grocery store and then see how long until somebody rolls on you to the cops?
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16 years ago
[deleted]
mr_bennett
15 years ago
Buzz Aldrin talked about the moon landings on "In The Shadow Of The Moon" And the shuttle doesn't have a replacement?? Haven't you heard of Ares?
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[email protected]
15 years ago
Ares is a step backward.
But the trouble is not with NASA, it is with Congress. Congress controls the budget and you can't soar with eagles when all you have to eat is chickenfeed.
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mr_bennett
15 years ago
Ares is tasked with going back to the Moon and eventually to Mars, hardly a step backwards from the orbit-chained shuttle.
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[email protected]
15 years ago
"Ares is tasked with going back to the Moon and eventually to Mars, hardly a step backwards from the orbit-chained shuttle."
Yes, it's a step backward. A step forward would be a fully reusable vehicle with a decent thermal protection system that reduces launch costs to a level where fuel is the main cost driver. Instead we've got more throwaways that aren't substantially more capable than the half century old designs used for Apollo.
As for going to Mars, if you think that that thing is ever going to put a man on Mars I have a nice bridge between the two best beach-front ski resorts in Iowa.
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mr_bennett
15 years ago
It's not what I think, it's what NASA thinks. They know a bit more than me and you. It just depends on whether the US government will allow the funding.
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[email protected]
15 years ago
"It's not what I think, it's what NASA thinks. They know a bit more than me and you. It just depends on whether the US government will allow the funding."
First, it's barely got enough performance for a Moon landing, second the government is _not_ going to spend what it will take to do a Mars mission with throwaway boosters.
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jaystarstar
14 years ago
The Teabagger/ "I Don't Want To Pay No Taxes For Nothin'" crowd has ensured that NASA is out of the manned spaceflight business.
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dcgalloway1956
10 years ago
I have read "Dark Mission" by Richard C. Hoagland and it is an excellent and thought-provoking book. When Armstrong and Aldrin were on the Moon it appears that they saw alien spacecraft. Immediately a private radio channel was selected and the conversation became confidential. It is interesting to note that upon his return to Earth Neil Armstrong retreated to his farm in Wapakoneta, OH and generally refused to give interviews because he was scared about what he discovered. In his book Hoagland describes how one of the terms of Maxwell's Equations was removed by British physicist Oliver Heaviside in the 19th Century. The missing term explains how energy from higher dimensions creates phenomena such as Jupiter's Great Red Spot. In simple geometric terms when a sphere in inscribed inside a tetrahedron the vertex of the tetrahedron is 19.3 degrees below the equator of the sphere which describes perfectly the location of Jupiter's Great Red Spot. Nazi scientists were brought to this country to work in our space program. This was under the auspices of Operation Paper Clip. They communicated with the Nazi scientists working in the Russian space program. Hoagland concluded in his book that Russia and the United States were operating parallel space programs. Several of the Nazi scientists in this country were later deported due to the crimes they committed in Germany. There is a bill in Congress to terminate Social Security payments to German Nazis who became American citizens and then were deported after being declared undesirable aliens. Because of the rampant fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism now plaguing this country it is now difficult for NASA to obtain sufficient funding to operate an effective space program. If the political will was there I am sure that we could send a team of astronauts to Mars in the next decade. This is a fascinating topic.
David C. Galloway
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jaystarstar
10 years ago
It's fascinating if you're an idiot.
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4) You ever seen Superman $#$# his pants? Case closed.
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dcgalloway1956
10 years ago
That remark was unnecessary. I am not an idiot. I graduated with honors from college with a 3.7 GPA and was inducted into Who's Who in America in 2007. I am very familiar with the problems that NASA has had over the years going back to when my father worked for a NASA contractor as an aerospace engineer in Brevard County, FL from 1968 to 1971.
David C. Galloway
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