Making Lemonade

While it seems reasonable to squander a trillion dollars here and a trillion dollars there when it comes to seizing control of Wall Street, failing car companies and healthcare, it doesn't seem to make as much sense to spend government dollars on research, science and some of those public good tasks which can't readily be achieved by free enterprise investment. You simply don't get a grateful constituency in return for spending money in red states like TX and FL on a space program that most Americans don't quite understand anymore.

So, we've got the announcement that the Bamster is pulling the plug on manned space flight. We've got a mere couple of remaining shuttle missions and the fund reduction means we aren't going back to the moon or dreaming of what it would take to get to Mars. Imagine, we could get to the moon in 1969 but forty years later the mission is too tough to do.

Just as we are embracing the foreign policy of apology to all and sundry accompanied by deep and self-effacing bows, so also we are becoming indelibly indebted to countries which are more aggressive in their economic outlook than we have become. Now we will become begging passengers in the space transportation systems of other nations. How low we have sunk.

But, the truism has always been that when given lemons one should make lemonade. Read this great scientific mind:

The Real Science is Done by Unmanned Vehicles

Wow! This guy is teaching young college students to really dream big, isn't he? He's a Nobel Prize winner in Physics, which means he has contributed as much to that science as the Messiah has to peace! Oh? Never mind.

Reading critically, we see that he builds a very fragile straw structure.

All of the brilliant NASA discoveries in astronomy have been made by unmanned satellite-borne observatories. There is much more to be done, such as exploring the first fraction of a second of the big bang, observing the birth of stars and collisions of black holes, and measuring the mysterious dark energy that makes up most of the energy of the universe.

I'm just a political science adjunct and a crude tactical aviator, but I'd have to remind the good physicist that Hubble wouldn't have made those "brilliant discoveries" were it not for the ability of astronauts to get to the thing and correct the malfunctions of the wings and orientation so that it could actually work.

We might also want to recall as we head to a downtown metro area with GPS guidance to the address we've never been before that the network of satellites which support that technology was inserted into orbit because we developed the required lift capacity to deal with manned flight. He apparently prefers the intermittent beeps of the Sputnik/Telstar period. Grapefruits in space...

But, when we get to the end of his whimper we find out what it really was that motivated him:

In the early 1990s, the International Space Station came up for funding. It was in competition with a large elementary particle accelerator, the Superconducting Supercollider, then under construction near Dallas. After testifying for the SuperCollider, I heard a congressman say he could comprehend how our understanding of the universe could be helped by the Space Station, but not by the SuperCollider. In 1993, Congress decided to continue funding for the Space Station, and cancelled the SuperCollider.

It was a tragic mistake. Without the SuperCollider, we have discovered nothing that would take us beyond our present theories in searching for the laws of nature.

See? He was heavily invested in the Supercollider and it lost to the ISS. His pet project got relegated to dependence upon the European collider project. Now he's got his payback and it tastes like heavily sweetened lemonade. Take that you astronauts and dreamers!