Re: Bush cancels Hubble telescope rescue mission

From: MonkeyHawk (monkeyhawk_at_sbcglobal.net)
Date: 01/27/05 

Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 04:22:09 GMT

"OrionCA" <OrionCA@earthlink.net> wrote

> Realistically, private spaceflight is about where NASA was in the
> early 1960s. Had NASA continued on a linear path after Apollo we
> would be arguing the merits of building a 2nd moon outpost OR
> establishing a Martian colony right now. Private space is a lot
> farther away than that, unfortunately.
>
> Each time NASA loses a manned mission it gets harder to justify
> keeping the program to Congress; they have other priorities and mouths
> to feed. They can explain away the occasional industrial accident:
> they can't explain ignoring the tile damage to Columbia or the icicles
> on Challenger's sold fuel rockets. The astronauts on the remaining
> 1st generation orbiter missions HAVE to live or there may not be a 2nd
> generation orbiter nor a new mission to the moon or to the inner
> planets.

If science had driven the Challenger launch it would have been scratched.

Reagan (or, to be more accurate, those who were managing him) wanted to
salute a "Teacher in Space" in his State of the Union address. The candle
*had* to be lit that day. There were plenty of NASA folks who urged that
the mission be delayed.

Columbia, some years later, was like driving a Chrysler K car into space.
1970s technology pushed beyond its practical lifespan.

In December 2003, George WMD Bush announced the U.S. was going back to the
Moon to set up a support mission to Mars. As soon as someone asked, "What
for?" the project became as popular as a child molester uncle living in the
cellar.

There's plenty of basic science that should be conducted in outer space.
Most of it needn't be accompanied by human beings. There's a certain about
of worthwhile applied science and practical enterprise that involves live
human beings in space. Insofar as the practical enterprise can support the
applied science, the applied science of human space travel should be
subsidized to a certain degree by all the industrialized governments of the
world. Spaced-based basic research should be underwritten by all earth
governments and institutions.

I don't mind some of my tax money helping subsidize Boeing and Airbus and
Burt Rutan and, I dunno, Penn and Teller as they perfect the next generation
90-minute around-the-world super jumbo jet...as long as the corporations put
up their share of the money. And I don't mind in the least that my 2-cents
a year contribution to the Hubble telescope resulted in ten times more
questions than the ten million answers it gave us.

And then there's the retail market. We're long past the era when
governments should be called upon to subsidize private companies'
satellites. I love HBO and ESPN and On*Star as much as anybody, but
TimeWarner, Disney, and General Motors are making too much money at the
public trough.

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