Rant: On Space

I saw this on  Engadget today.  The Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down for the last time. This just makes me ill that we haven’t even developed a replacement and that NASA has to go around with a tin cup begging for money.

And that’s all she wrote for one of the most inspiring things our government has ever done.   We can’t afford to keep the space program up and running.

Or at least that is what the soulless assholes who have no vision for doing something great would tell you.

NASA’s entire operational budget right now costs the same amount it costs to provide air conditioning to soldiers in Iraq and Afganistan.   Not to maintain the bases, or keep the weapons there.  Not to train all those soldiers, not to transport them.  Just to provide the air conditioning when they’re there.

Meanwhile the great computer boom in the economy in the 1990s was nearly entirely from the space program.  In fact if you look at almost every significant technological boom in the last few decades it has its roots in either the space program or the military.

But for some reason it’s easier to get money to murder people than it is to send people into space. I can’t understand why why we can’t get the funding not to put a man on Mars but to put a city of 600,000 people on Mars.