Over on his own site, Bogey has a bit of a rant on Bush’s proposal to revive the manned space program. I agree with his conclusion, which may shock him, although the “pollution” line goes a bit far!
Kennedy proposed the mission to the moon as a goal to bring the country together in a time of internal conflict. Perhaps Bush wants to try and do the same.
The arguments against the proposal will encompass many of Bogey’s thoughts. One that always makes me roll my eyes is “This money could be spent on education.” For those of you who feel this way, check statistics on increases in spending versus graduation rates, standardized test scores, or any other metric you want.
The Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs provided impetus for research that brought us many benefits. Two of the more mundane were Velcro and freeze-dried food. The flights themselves gave us little. Unless there are some classified reports with magic information we haven’t yet seen, all the moon rocks were sex stones. (Okay, maybe I need to explain that to some of you–just a bunch of f****** rocks.) The achievement was in the doing, and the byproducts from making it all happen.
Someone made the comment that this will encourage young people to become interested in science and engineering. Right. Let’s first try to get them interested in reading, writing, and math. And perhaps limiting the number of law degrees passed out each year.
Face it, there is little we can gain from this except wonder. If wonder is once again in fashion, then do it. I’m not interested in paying for it, but what does my opinion matter? I’m not interested in paying for a lot of things the government does.
It’s cool. Men walking on Mars. Families living on the moon. Personally, I think the first step should be a simulated moon base where people can actually spend six months or a year in a hostile environment living “the good life.” Then we might see what benefits there are before spending a lot of money on the project.
My son says that Afghanistan fits the bill.
I’m new to this site, just browsing around
Comment by Shirley — August 8, 2004 @ 9:52 pm