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The Space Review: Seven generations: a re-evaluation of the Paine Report
by Jeff Fullerton
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

[Link]
This one tells all about the wasteful and lacking in vision the government space program has been. One good example given in this report was the obscene waste involved in the disposal of the external fuel tank of the space shuttle orbiter which was jettisoned to burn up on re-entry rather than taking the trouble to stockpile them in orbit. Considering the great cost involved on lifting every pound of mass into orbit—those things were a potential goldmine of building material for space stations, fuel depots and even interplanetary spaceships capable of taking people all over the solar system.

But NASA and the government contractors that like to slop at the public trough has a preference for reinventing the wheel—spending billions on paper studies for the current space station. I think there is a strong political constituency to keep humanity earthbound out of fear of loosing control if millions of people were to move out and colonize space. And the fat cat contractors are content to milk the system for what it is worth while NASA plods on in the current tepid fashion making less headway in 40 years than it did in the first decade of its existence where it could actually meet the bold and visionary goal of JFK: putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth! And so much for "We Choose to go to the Moon in this Decade. And to do the other things—not because they are easy but because they are hard"!

A far cry from that can-do attitude is the current Can't Do of NASA in 2004 when Bush 43 made a timid, poorly articulated proposal to return to the moon along with a manned mission to Mars. To which the space agency responded: maybe by 2030 or 2040.

Something is obviously wrong there.

This is fodder for a future article for the Libertarian Enterprise that I started on this morning. Hope to have it ready by next weekend. Was going to push it for this week's edition but this is the start of what looks like the best weekend in a long time with a stretch of 70 degree days and sunny conditions going into the foreseeable future and I need the time to catch up on things outdoors. And also I want to have more time to research and write a really good one that is to be a revisiting of Marshall T. Savage's "The Millennial Project".

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