The Space Race and it's downfall.......

[rickstine]

the space race did not fizzle in a short term effect and I'm not saying going to the moon ways not a big achievement. What I mean is NASA failed to keep public interest some fourty years ago,and was supposed to lead mankind towards the heavens. But fourty years plus we are in the information age in which the tools that are changing are lives are not rocketry, but software and microchips. Microchips has improved many parts of are lives from safer cars to getting information faster which has done a lot of good for us all. NASA and the government disbanded it's goals with false promises after public interest became less concerned. Now space tech. is sort of a secondary usage and is only applied for a certain purpose like medical purposes which is a good thing in its self. Remember when people said by the year two thousand people will have colonized the moon, but yet we are still here all on Earth. Space technology has improved are lives from preserving foods to last longer, to medicine, to the cars we drive, to G.P.S. all space race technologies. It takes time before people realized how they could apply new technoloy to a every day use for the average person. The same can still be today, when NASA says it will take millions to put stuff into space much is true, but if they put a little at a time it comes out cheap. Remember when NASA lunched space missions to Mars around the mid 90's saying cheaper and more missions will allow them to explore Mars, but what happened all them failed from software glitches or mechanical problems, you really can't expect much if you cheap out on things like this. The space shuttle is one cool thing, but it's outdated in terms of escaping Earth's gravity by using large amount of rocket fuel, and when I say outdated I mean from the mid 90's and onward. NASA could lunched a space ship into orbit by dropping it in mid flight underneath a large aircraft, which is good but it won't carry much of a pay load or use magnetic catapult which can car

 

[le3119]

NASA didn't have to get the public involved, X-Prize is a totally private effort, and the competition is producing some excellent manned launch systems. I agree that the US made a mistake in not seeking a way to make permanent the gains of Apollo by establishing a lunar outpost, but advances in IT, robotics and spacecraft materials will make a belated return to the Moon very profitable. NASA is the space agency, US Congress and the presidents have sent mixed signals over the last 40 years in their space strategies. Ultimately its the politicians, and that means us the voters. As for the ISS, I wish the designers would have built a simpler platform with a lunar transport, giving manned access to the Moon at least once every month or so, we'd have several moon returns under our belt by now. But it's not my profession.....so.....