1 Wait... what's wrong with omnipresent pornography?

2

Don't forget nuclear fusion.

We were supposed to have nuclear fusion by now.  I can clearly remember reading a host of articles in 60's, 70's and even in the 80's (like Omni) how fusion was "about 30 years away".

The underlying answer is cheap energy.  It takes cheap energy to perform high technology that is used to move steel, aluminum and titanium into orbit.

The internet, cell phones, hi-def TV, and even omnipresent porn are low energy answers to enterntaining ourselves when we aren't being worker drones.

3 I used to be a big fan of the space program but as time went by after Apollo you could see that NASA had indeed been consumed by the government bureaucracy fever.

That is what caused the Challenger explosion more than anything else. But the findings blamed it on a different reason and the whitewash ensued.

Now I am ready to kill the program entirely and eliminate NASA all together.

So what am I reading today? Just finished W.E.B. Griffin's new book The Vigilantes. If you like cop stuff it is good. Next on the agenda is the book by Thomas Sowell on the Housing Bust.

4 Do not look to the government/NASA for the future of space.  Look to private industry, to "new space".  That is where all the energy is.   Politically, the main task of true lovers of space is to prevent the government from screwing up new space and killing the emerging sector.  That is the greatest danger.

5 I grew up taking for granted that I lived in the future, and therefore would have all the cool stuff ....: domed cities, .....

Well we have doomed cities now so I hope you're happy.

Big Science and Big Government produce catastrophe at least as often as success.

I speak from direct experience, The upper management and some of the top engineers were the product of ass kissing politics. Every project, the machinists and assemblers were red lining prints.

6 The underlying answer is cheap energy

We could have cheap energy, it is all there. Instead what we have is "political energy". The anarchists who want to tear down the Western world do not you to have cheap energy.

7 8
Yes indeed. That would make us completely unmanageable.

8 I used to be a big fan of the space program but as time went by after Apollo you could see that NASA had indeed been consumed by the government bureaucracy fever. I think NASA's structure was flawed right from the start when it was spun off from NACA -- it was never given a clear mandate on what the ultimate goal of human space travel was, and furthermore always had to serve two masters: the civilian government, and the military. Many cargos and probes that could have been delivered to space more cheaply on a rocket were instead engineered so they could fit into the Shuttle's cargo bay. Why? To give the Shuttle something to do, and justify its huge cost. The military always had first-call on shuttle services (mainly for recon KEYHOLE birds), which threw the shuttle's flight schedule into chaos. The EELV program did produce some notable successes: the Delta IV in particular. It's a wonderfully reliable workhorse booster for small-to-medium payloads. Our problem now is that with the death of both the Saturn V and now the Shuttle programs, we have no real heavy-lift booster in our inventory. We have the Atlas V, but it's not as reliable as other comparable systems and still not sufficient for heavier cargo (nor is it human-rated). I do have high hopes for private firms like XCOR and SpaceX, though. However, to make space exploration profitable for private companies we are going to have to institute a private-property regime for space. (If I decide to go into, say, asteroid mining: do I own that asteroid? Can I prevent other people from mining it? How would this be enforced?)

9 I grew up taking for granted that I lived in the future, and therefore would have all the cool stuff I saw on the sci-fi shows: domed cities, space-ships, jet-packs, aliens, and moon-bases.

When I was in grammar school we used to get those "Weekly Readers". They used to always have these incredible predictions about what the future would bring.

Some of the stuff like lasers have come into play but not in the manner that was predicted.  Other things like flying cars not only didn't materialize, but the exploding mass of federal regulations pretty much has shutdown anything like that altogether.

Now that is what they should have predicted, the federal government would grow by a factor of 10⁶ and people would sit idly by while they lost all of their freedom to do anything without extensive government oversight and control.

10 This also reminds me of that line from The Right Stuff: "You know what makes this bird go up? Funding makes this bird go up." Wolfe's book was the best history of the early space program ever written, and it was a wonderful movie as well. One of my favorites. ("My name...Jose Jimenez!")

11 One of my favorites. ("My name...Jose Jimenez!")

I can see him on the Ed Sullivan Show like it was just yesterday.

12

So: it's been a depressing time for fans of human exploration of space.

Just don't tell Stephen Hawking

O/T...and petty...but I do really enjoy mocking the ponytailed,  porcine pedaler over at Tiny Blue Nutballs

...Chuckie is just so gosh-darned frustrated with Beck that now he is trying to attack his word usage...and fails

Beck said:

"NO signs (political or otherwise) as they may deter from the peaceful message we are bringing to Washington."

...and the fat man commented in his post:

          "Deter from?” Is English his first language?"

deter from

Meaning: to make someone less likely to do something, or to discourage someone from doing something, to make something less likely

 

13

3  and then he'll con people into making robots just like themselves and having the robots turn on us in a final armegeddon -- which ironically, could very well happen

Is it safe to come back here today?  No more religion talk I hope?

Meh, I'd prefer NASA was gone; it's a boondoggle. As a child I too wanted to see the exploration of space and the technologies come home to improve people's lives and the environment (domed cities, clean energy, the whole shebang).  Somewhere around the time I became a teenager I slowly realized that those were utopian dreams, and what was worse, the people in power were playing off people's sincere utopian dreams to further enslave them and use up the world.  So NASA and the space program has become tied in with that budding knowledge -- I can almost say I hate it now.

I do however want a pet otter, really badly.

14 Just for you Monty

http://tinyurl.com/ybuwzf6

15 - Ad Astra...

Instant nostalgia trigger for the L₅ Society, whose members were responsible for dragging me along, kicking and screaming, to the landing of STS-1... almost 30 years ago.

Good times.

16 I do however want a pet otter, really badly.

I don't know, I have this urge for Ugg boots.

17 I do however want a pet otter, really badly.

I don't know, I have this urge for Ugg boots.

Kill two birds with one stone and make Ugg Boots out of Otters.

18 Meh, I'd prefer NASA was gone; it's a boondoggle. Alas, I fear you are right. I'd rather see NASA's bloated bureaucracy destroyed, the main office turned back into NACA (in an advisory capacity only to private industry), and JPL/Goddard given control over deep-space probes and pure science missions. (Though private industry would continue to provide the boosters and launch infrastructure.) Downsized Upscale is right that human beings aren't really engineered for long-duration space-travel, though -- I suspect that we will have to bioengineer ourselves before long-duration space-travel becomes feasible. (Or we simply inject our consciousnesses into robots.)

19

I remember my sixth grade teacher taking us all to his house to watch one of the early launches about 1961. There were about 30 of us in his class and he lived a block from school. One of the advantages of growing up in a small town. I'm interested in space, but not to the point of being a hard core SciFi fan. Never was that into Star Trek (heresy, I know), though I do enjoy Heinlein and others. I know whole Space, Future stuff didn't happen as envisioned but when you realize what we have gotten out of it, on balance we did pretty good, with more to come if we have the courage to pursue it.

Just started reading We Were Soldiers Once and Young. Enjoyed the movie and finally found the book.

20

The anarchists who want to tear down the Western world do not you to have cheap energy.

And 100% of them want to see Democrats running things, while there are still things to run.  When I was a kid I thought people who voted a straight party ticket were ignorant.  With the rise of a Democratic Party that is essentially an international criminal enterprise, an honest person today has little choice but to do so.

21 a big problem with NASA today is that its mission has been seriously diluted with lots of extraneous goals, like "education" and "outreach" and whatnot.  sure, going around the country showing off spacesuits to kids is a great thing to do, but really, NASA's first goal should be to throw shit into space.

22 I suspect that they do have a replacement for the shuttle but it is being held up under secret classification for the military. Stuff like the Mach 8+ Aurora scramjet could probably easily achieve low earth orbit. 

23 well, Downsized Upscale, the only upside to mining helium 3 is to use it for fusion power, and since we haven't got that worked out either, it wouldn't really matter right now how much helium 3 we mined

24 O/T:  Sorry to interrupt your book thread but is anyone watching Chris Wallace...?

I mean it is a sad day when CNN and MSNBC are more credible, when you can actually see fox's agenda.

In response to the poll about BO being a muslim, williams is back on the "it's the right wing, people are uncomfortable with a black president, this is being cause by Rush Linbaugh"  track.  I mean this is old Juan, old, just as old as the "racist" theme.

25 Not to worry, the current government doesn't want you to have fusion power anyway. Or for that matter, fission power.  No matter how much they talk about CO2 and "clean energy", as that link I posted last night about the government halting re-licensing a dam in SC in 1940 shows, we know the true intent is.

Look at the bill that was passed. Nothing but huge confiscatory taxes and regulations. So the real problem is that we are not taxed enough and don't have enough government control over our lives.

26 Jane, I think you're safe. But if you think The Next Generation is superior to the original Star Trek, you may be damned for all time. :-)

27 I've often thought that one of the best ways to get people involved in space travel and space technology again would be to get them directly involved: set up a station on mars with some tiny little rovers -- and then let regular folks "drive" the rovers! It could be done safely, and could in fact be turned into a game: how far can you drive your tiny little rover? How many interesting rocks of different types can you find? There are many, many highly-intelligent people in the world who could make a mission like that a resounding success, I think. And it wouldn't cost much more than a typical Mars mission. I'm not so sure about the whole "space tourism" think that Virgin Galactic and Bigelow Aerospace are counting on, though. It seems to be a pastime for super-rich geeks rather than an avenue to permanent space colonization, but we'll see. I wonder if China or India will drive space-launch costs down in the same way they drove manufacturing costs down?

28 O/T: scary trend: credit card/ATM card skimmers

29 Uhh, let me be clear.  NASA's current mission of funding vital research into making shit up about the global climate is of paramount importance to our Democratic form of goverment.  And also to Al Gore's investment portfolio.  And the future income of Goldman Sachs.

30 29 I suspect that they do have a replacement for the shuttle but it is being held up under secret classification for the military. Stuff like the Mach 8+ Aurora scramjet could probably easily achieve low earth orbit. 

Posted by: Vic at August 22, 2010 10:35 AM (/jbAw)

But not the x-37?

http://tinyurl.com/ybjmrby

31 set up a station on mars with some tiny little rovers -- and then let regular folks "drive" the rovers!

well, one problem is, the "driving" wouldn't be in real time due to the long delay in sending commands back and forth.

32 But not the x-37?

That is just another expensive copy of the shuttle. I doubt since the NASA cutbacks that it will ever be put into operation.

33 http://tinyurl.com/23gb82

Star Wars - Episode IV - Trailer (original 1977)

34

Weekly Reader and Bill Dana. Geez, thanks Vic. I'm going to be 60 in two weeks. Thanks for making that easier, man. Lets just throw Howdy Doody and hula hoops in the mix so I don't even have to get out of bed!

:-)

35 well, one problem is, the "driving" wouldn't be in real time due to the long delay in sending commands back and forth. Yeah, I know -- in fact, you wouldn't even sent the commands in "near time" (with the light-time lag between comms). You'd want techs to check the "driving plan" to make sure the excitied noob wasn't sending your little rover off a cliff or into a ditch or something. Still, the game could make it seem that way, and then a day or two later you'd see the results of your driving plan. I guarantee you that there would be millions of geeks all over the world who'd jump at the chance to do something like that. Or have some sort of weather-station/atmospheric-sampling station set up that simply beams out continuous streams of data to whoever is interested. Just hook it up to the internet and let fly. You'd get terabytes of fascinating stuff out of that. Lots of talented geeks out there! There is already a certain amount of this going on in astronomy. Backyard stargazers, schoolkids, and serious amateurs find new stuff all the time.

36 "I'm not so sure about the whole "space tourism" think that Virgin Galactic and Bigelow Aerospace are counting on, though. It seems to be a pastime for super-rich geeks rather than an avenue to permanent space colonization, but we'll see."

When I read this all I thought of was the real estate developers getting involved.  Like "the Trump organization goes to Mars"  I mean even the ads started to crystallize in my mind.  And guys like BF would make sure it wasn't just the rich geeks that got a little piece of mars, he'd make sure the poorer folks had a good mortgage program.

37 I don't know. It just depresses me. When I was a kid, I thought I would be living in the future, where the future meant space-travel. It turns out that "the future" is video games, cheap electronics, hi-def television, and omnipresent pornography. Who knew?

You can be certain that taxpayers had no idea when JFK energized NASA that all of OUR investment would be pirated by the globalist corporations intent on subjugating the masses, enabled by our own corrupted government officials.

The same argument crosses over to explain why Sharian Islam is progressively subjugating Western civilization. Our corrupt politicians in their official capacities are paving the way through PC application of laws and our taxes to promote Sharian Islam at the expense of American moderate Muslims who must remain anonymous within their communities run by the Sharians. But neither the American government nor the media can or will keep a secret. Andrew McCarthy's point at NRO

38 I'm going to be 60 in two weeks.

LOL, brings back memories huh?

39 Latin is confusing, according to several online sources Per Aspera Ad Astra also means "To the stars through difficulty" and Ad Astra Per Aspera is the Kansas state motto.

40

Let me be clear...NASA's primary mission is to make Muslims feel better about themselves....and to lie about global warming..

...all this spaceship stuff is just fucking weird

 

41 13 This also reminds me of that line from The Right Stuff: "You know what makes this bird go up? Funding makes this bird go up."

Wolfe's book was the best history of the early space program ever written, and it was a wonderful movie as well. One of my favorites. ("My name...Jose Jimenez!")

Posted by: Monty at August 22, 2010 10:21 AM (wUa1V)

"No bucks, No Bucks Rodgers"

42 Space travel has its fascination. But so has time travel.

43 It is an age of devolution. The general population is being dumbed down, an inevitable by-product of public school indoctrination designed to separate them from their roots as Americans and turn them into good little global citizens. That brought with it the death of intellectual curiosity and the emphasis on our celebrity culture.

44 You know, they still have Weekly Reader but like all school things now, they are infested with liberal crap.

http://tinyurl.com/3696fvw

Whereas in the 50s we learned about science and the future, now they learn about "green" and earth day.

45 "It turns out that "the future" is video games, cheap electronics, hi-def television, and omnipresent pornography. Who knew?"

Dystopian SF writers, PK Dick especially.  Sucks, but true.

46 48

Let me be clear...NASA's primary mission is to make Muslims feel better about themselves....and to lie about global warming..

...all this spaceship stuff is just fucking weird

 

Posted by: Barack Islam Obama at August 22, 2010 10:54 AM (Q3TFM)

And if Nasa every gets to Titan, they'll find out I'm really a Denibian space parasite occupying this pathetic human's GI tract.

47 - Weekly Reader and Bill Dana.

And don't forget SRA (Science Research Associates) Reading Test cards! Color coded, IIRC.

I'm sure they're outlawed by communist constructivist ed. today.

48 40 But not the x-37?

That is just another expensive copy of the shuttle. I doubt since the NASA cutbacks that it will ever be put into operation.

Posted by: Vic at August 22, 2010 10:47 AM (/jbAw)

I thought the Air Force took over the program and moved it to Black Ops

49 So I am putting a dvd in for the kids, and the remote is somewhere in some couch, so they have to watch the previews cause there are no buttons on the dvd player other than play.

So 2 points, one, the future came without simplicity and second, one of the previews was for Avatar, which I didn't see, but from the preview I would say that must have been the worst movie ever made.  Good Lord, what a bunch of commie pablum that thing looks like.

50

Wait...

What?? We went to the moon??

Dammit people..I have a cell phone. I don't care if I'm on vacation. Call me when something important like this happens.

51 Ad Astra Per Aspera "To the stars through difficulty"
Posted by: Deathknyte

The Roman chariot had its limitations. 

52 53 "It turns out that "the future" is video games, cheap electronics, hi-def television, and omnipresent pornography. Who knew?"

Dystopian SF writers, PK Dick especially.  Sucks, but true.

Posted by: BJ at August 22, 2010 10:56 AM (qX40S)

I remember reading a short story of his where the main character was haunted by omnipresent advertising. Kind of like pop-up adds today

53 Avatar was a gorgeous movie with the most juvenile, asinine message you ever saw. They should have been embarrassed by that.

54

Don't be fooled by the Pluto lobby.

Pluto is not a planet.

55 You know when you say "I didn't go to see Avatar or inception" people look at you like there is something totally wrong with you.   Almost how they look at you when you say you really don't like American Idol or care what little spoiled lyndsey is doing these days.

56 I loved Weekly Reader, and yeah, it wasn't PC crap like so much is now. But, like Lou Reed said "those were different times".

57 The AF took it over for a payload mover. If NASA goes back to operational it will probably go back to them.

58

I wonder if China or India will drive space-launch costs down in the same way they drove manufacturing costs down? - Monty

I think that is unlikely.  The Chinese and Indians are more bureaucratic than we are, already.  Right now, they are only doing the "easy" things that we did in the sixties.

If you ever read "Chaos Manner", Jerry Pournelle's blog, he talks about the problem of space flight (in depth) from time to time.  A promising project, the DC-X, was scuttled in the late 80's.  This "X-program" MIGHT have led to an economical single stage to orbit booster, but it was seen as competition to the shuttle, which already had problems. The Iron Law of Bureaucracy killed it.

What the Iron Law of Bureaucracy has done has driven out the most imaginative and innovative engineers  from NASA. Once  they experience the confounding anti-progress, anti-innovation effects if the bureaucracy, they bail out.

Seriously, what could really help NASA in the short run (~ 5 years) is to have a series of X-programs that are aimed at solving one major problem with innovative, fast track engineering. Think it, design it, build it, test it in shorter time frames.  Not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and not being afraid of failures in the name of innovation.

Kennedy's mandate, "To send a man to the moon, and return him safely, by the end of the decade",  put some pressure on to actually achieve something. People at NASA had to innovate like the devil to make things work. Now, it's just another government paycheck, and everybody has a rice bowl to fill.  The sclerosis of the bureaucracy is intentional, as it preserves the status quo; that's the goal, not getting back to the moon, Mars, cheap access to low orbit.

Jobs saved or preserved.  In the government.  That's the goal.

 

59 what happened to the future?

The 1970s.  The dawn of the new Democrat party, who said, "Hey, we can spend tax money to buy the votes of the poor, and guarantee we'll be in power forever.  And when they need more money, we'll give it to them, and they'll vote for us more!"

From whence came the slums, perpetual poverty, and the idea that Welfare was an "entitlement." 

In all that, the idea of space exploration or the actual future, was sacrificed to the Democrat future.

60 51 It is an age of devolution. The general population is being dumbed down, an inevitable by-product of public school indoctrination designed to separate them from their roots as Americans and turn them into good little global citizens. That brought with it the death of intellectual curiosity and the emphasis on our celebrity culture.

Posted by: real joe at August 22, 2010 10:56 AM (w7Lv+)

Are we are not Men? We are DEVO!

http://tinyurl.com/ybwncc7

61 When I was growing up (in the 1950s), I dreamed of all that "future" stuff, too. I read sci-fi avidly, which was easy because my parents subscribed to all the pulp sci-fi magazines.

What killed that future, I think -- aside from scientific reality -- was that all future goodness was based on a society that had no poverty, racial strife or governmental greed/corruption. There were no "greens," no terrorists except the ones from other worlds. Everything went toward building the World of the Future, to getting off our planet and spreading throughout the galaxy.

Funny thing: there didn't seem to be much pollution or waste in that future, either.

Growing up with Asimov, Fred Hoyle and the like, I tuned out when Heinlein got preachy, and left the scene when "fantasy" sci-fi took over. I dug babes and dudes in spacesuits wandering the cosmos, not 25th-Century sorcerers and their related mumbo-jumbo.

62 One of my earliest memories, in fact, is of sitting on my grandmother's lap watching one of the Apollo moon landings on our old black-and-white television.

I can remember sitting on my father's lap watching Michael Jordan return from a second retirement to play for the Washington Wizards.

63 Folks, gotta take a break and get some lunch. Back later.

64 Forgive my insolence at being OT, but I have questions.
I've been reading and slightly posting here for couple years.

1. What is the F'ing hobo reference? Why do we hunt roast and eat hobos??? 

2. What is the MFM ???    It's the media, no doubt, but please expand on M F M.

3. Why are readers "Morons?" Is that just a cute name for readers? Did some public figure call us morons?  Are we just truly morons?

Please add these and more to your FAQ  if you could.

65

1. What is the F'ing hobo reference? Why do we hunt roast and eat hobos??? 
Protein

2. What is the MFM ???    It's the media, no doubt, but please expand on M F M.

The last letter stands for "media"..use you imagination for "MF"
3. Why are readers "Morons?" Is that just a cute name for readers? Did some public figure call us morons?  Are we just truly morons?

yup

66 I dug babes and dudes in spacesuits wandering the cosmos, not 25th-Century sorcerers and their related mumbo-jumbo.

BIGOT!!!!!!! 

67 Thanks beedubya for clearing all that up so well.

68 Why do we hunt roast and eat hobos???

can you think of a better use for them?

69 Yeah, and after you got up I was in traction for two months. Cut back on them Twinkies, girl.

70 Lazio, on Meet the depressed.  Gee finally he came out from under his rock cause palladino is so cleaning his clock.

71 I don't know if a commenter originally used MFM or if ace came up with it, but main stream media and left wing media just didn't quite reach the depth of our contempt for the american pravda we have.  The other M is for mother in case you didn't figure it out.

72 We must be the same age. The Apollo missions exploded my science-fiction-fueled imagination. I never dreamed that that would be our peak. And we did all that with the most unimaginably primitive computers, electronics, and networks. Space Shuttle? BFD, and not the Joe Biden kind. Mars and lunar mining had seemed a sure thing for the 90's.

73

34 Not really much of a Trekkie, but will admit that I liked it more than Star Wars.  And yeah, the original Trek was much better than NG.

Nooo!  Goooo!  You cannot make those cute little otters into Ugg boots!  I need to win the mega million lotto and buy a place kinda like a small version of the Nuge's...but I wouldn't hunt the otters, I'd have them as pets -- they could be my trained watch/attack otters and hang out in the pond, come up and bite intruders' ankles off -- kinda like SEALS...but cuter.

(which I have a pair of, Ugg boots that is, courtesy of my daughter's late Golden Retriever chewing the top of her elder sister's pair, when they were both home together on leave -- they are ugly as sin, but quite comfy in the winter time).

74 MrScribbler: I think the cause of many of America's woes post-1970's is simply this: lack of civilizational confidence. There was a spirit in the post WWII America that had a (perhaps naive) belief that science and engineering and good old American know-how could solve any problem. We had no business going to the moon in the 1960's; it was a century before its time. But we did it because we didn't know we couldn't. But then you had all the upheavals of the late 1960's and 1970's: social, racial, technological. Three Mile Island, the Ford Pinto, the long decline of America's industrial heartland into the Rust Belt. It didn't happen because it was inevitable; we just lost the strength and will to keep it going. That spirit of enervation, of timidity, took real root under Jimmy Carter's presidency -- particularly among the left and among Democrats more generally -- and only intensified over the years. I was born right at the end of the "steely-eyed missile man" age, and I regret it. I caught only a taste of that civilizational brawn, and had to grow up in the tidal muck that remained after the wave rolled back.

75

The other M is for mother in case you didn't figure it out.

...and the F ain't for father

76 Sphynx, as to the morons bit, stick around for a while, it becomes self-evindent.

77

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Aug 20 (Reuters) - An aircraft designed to launch Virgin Galactic's suborbital passenger spaceship was damaged in an accident on a California runway, manufacturer Scaled Composites said.

In a statement on its website, Scaled, a wholly owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, called Thursday's incident "minor" and noted that SpaceShipTwo was not attached to the carrier aircraft, known as WhiteKnightTwo, at the time.

WhiteKnightTwo began flying in 2008 and was making its 37th test flight on Thursday. The aircraft is designed to carry SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of about 45,000 feet (13,650 metres).

The six-passenger, two-pilot spaceship would then be released so it can fire its rocket engine to punch through Earth's atmosphere, experience a few minutes of weightlessness in suborbital space and then land on a runway.

Virgin Galactic, which is selling tickets to ride SpaceShipTwo for $200,000 a seat, has signed up about 340 customers so far. The company is an offshoot of Richard Branson's London-based Virgin Group and hopes to begin commercial space operations in late 2011 or 2012.

http://tinyurl.com/2clmb5t

78 Posted by: bigred at August 22, 2010 10:53 AM

I've been 60 for four months, dude.

I remember seeing Sputnik I crossing the sky, and I remember Alan Shepard and John Glenn. Laika the dog, too....

When you start getting nostalgic for those once-monthly nuke-war "duck and cover" drills and the Conelrad station on the radio, you know you are getting senile old.

The worst part is that no one younger gives a shit about that stuff, and their eyes glaze over when you mention anything that was vivid for you.

Now I know how my grandparents felt when they told me about the pre-Wright Bros. world....

79

63 You know when you say "I didn't go to see Avatar or inception" people look at you like there is something totally wrong with you.   Almost how they look at you when you say you really don't like American Idol or care what little spoiled lyndsey is doing these days.

Haven't had that happen directly to me, but I can totally see it. I didn't see Avatar, and have no real interest in doing so. I did see Inception, but it didn't wow me like some of my friends, who went to see it more than once. Once was enough for me, thank you.

And I've never really watched American Idol, either.

80 Yeah I think I was forced into watching American Idol for maybe one show.  It was just all-around stupid.  I couldn't believe that some people built their lives around that show.

81 Doesn't Rush use "MFM" as well???

82 The worst part is that no one younger gives a shit about that stuff, and their eyes glaze over when you mention anything that was vivid for you. I am a mere sprout of 43, and it's important to me. If the kids aren't interested, that's because we failed in making them know why this stuff is important. I hate to invest all my hopes in these cowboy startups like Armadillo Aerospace and XCOR and Scaled, because space exploration -- I believe -- takes the resources of a nation-state to fund properly. Private industry can capitalize on existing infrastructure, but path-breaking and exploration is a sovereign mandate. I just hope the America rediscovers that spirit. I don't want to short-change what we are doing, by the way. Remember that we already have a flotilla of craft on and around Mars; we have a probe orbiting Saturn (Cassini); and one recently around Jupiter (Galileo) and Venus (Magellan), and one on the way to Pluto. The Pioneers and Voyagers are still going, lonely sentinels of humanity far out near the heliopause.

83 Posted by: Book Geek at August 22, 2010 11:24 AM (1+OO5)

The inception crowd tells me that if you only have to watch it once you are a genius.  They keep going back cause they need to see it over and over to "fully understand it".  this is the first time I've said "ah, I'll wait for the DVD" and went to see "the other guys" instead.

84 I was born right at the end of the "steely-eyed missile man" age, and I regret it. I caught only a taste of that civilizational brawn, and had to grow up in the tidal muck that remained after the wave rolled back.
Posted by: Monty at August 22, 2010 11:17 AM

Living through the death of the "steely-eyed missile-man" age and the dawning of the Age of Osama Obama hasn't been a barrel of laughs, Monty.

Those of us who did have had to change a lot of thought patterns. Atomic Power was our friend, and now (according to contemporary wisdom) it is a curse. Space was Out There waiting for us, and now it is as far away as it was to the people of the Middle Ages.

And, it should be noted, Democrats were merely deluded in their policy choices then, and were not treasonous fuckwads.

I wonder if you're better off for coming along after the rot began to set in. You can always listen to the ravings of the elderly (of which I am now one, damnit)....

85 I don't actually know where the hobo thing came from and I've been reading for a while, I just went with it as it seemed like a good option in a bad economy, plus hobo season is almost the entire year, although the hunting is better in the winter when they all curl up together.

86 - Remember that we already have a flotilla of craft on and around Mars; we have a probe orbiting Saturn (Cassini)...

Oh, and there's that slightly-used Death Star orbiting Saturn at a cock-eyed (uh... 'beaconing'?) angle. ;^)

87 Anybody remember the Orion program of the late 1950's? Man, I wish we had gone that route.... And it would have had the salutory side-effect of driving all the hippies absolutely nuts. (Nukes in space ZOMG!)

88

MrS. and Telstar, and being in Band class and having it announced on the intercom that Shepard had just orbited the earth. And there was some crap going on in a place called Laos. Guess Monty is going to have to call this the Sunday Geezer Thread.

In the 60's my mother and aunts and uncles flew my grandparents from Milwaukee to Florida for a vacation. The only time they flew. This was when all the hi-jacking was going on. We joked that we hoped they enjoy Havana. They were born before Kitty Hawk.

89 Wolfe's book was the best history of the early space program ever written, and it was a wonderful movie as well. One of my favorites. ("My name...Jose Jimenez!") Posted by: Monty at August 22, 2010 10:21 AM (wUa1V) I recently purchased and read from cover-to-cover Chaikin's "A Man on the Moon": Time-Life's (cursed be they) 3 volume version, chock full of mission pictures. I was transfixed by the whole story. I was at my grandparents' island summer home when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon. No electricity, so I didn't see any of it live; we did have transistor radios, however. (In fact, what made a greater impression on members of my family during that vacation was Teddy the Swimmer's commission of negligent homicide on Martha's Vineyard.)

90 All I ask for is frickin shark with a frikin laser beam people!

91 ya2daup: If you liked Chaikin's book, you ought to pick up HBO's From The Earth to the Moon series. Tom Hanks produced it, and leftie that he is, he's also a bona fide space nut, and he did a superb job in making Chaikin's book into an excellent miniseries. Highly recommended (and a great bookend to the Apollo 13 movie).

92 Posted by: Monty at August 22, 2010 11:27 AM

I do have one friend, a mere puppy of 28, who loves to hear about what happened before she was born. She's a rarity, in my experience.

_{And is Teh Hawt, BTW}.

Private space exploration? There was a lot of that in "old" sci-fi, but it seemed to be an offshoot of what governments had already done. Spacecraft builders made civilian versions of their military/government ships. Sometimes, these were as common as Ford Tauruses are now.

I think some of the craze for One World governments stems from the sci-fi writings of the 1950s. Having a single entity ruling a planet sounds good when advances in science are allied with intelligent governance that lets people take care of themselves.

Tyrants tended to be destroyed in atomic conflagrations, too. That was cool....

93 ""It is an age of devolution. The general population is being dumbed down, an inevitable by-product of public school indoctrination designed to separate them from their roots as Americans and turn them into good little global citizens. That brought with it the death of intellectual curiosity and the emphasis on our celebrity culture.""


Give that man a prize, its right on frigging target. In one short paragraph it explained it all.

94 hobo season is almost the entire year, although the hunting is better in the winter when they all curl up together.
Posted by: Guy Fawkes at August 22, 2010 11:31 AM

Has anyone -- ace, maybe -- ever posted the bag limits for Hobo Season?

I've got my Hobo Gun ready, but am afraid of running afoul of the Game Wardens....

95 I want my personal Wal-mart jet-pack and my Jetson's car too.

96 Posted by: bigred at August 22, 2010 11:35 AM

There was a popular tune circa 1960-62 -- couldn't call it "rock," but it got heavy play on the radio stations the yoots listened to back then -- called "Telstar."

Shut up, Scribbler, and go take your Geritol.

97 There's a trilogy: "Red Mars", "Green Mars", and "Blue Mars", in which the idea that if colonization, with terraforming, of Mars were attempted, the human colonists of Mars would become, in essence, a separate race due to the differences in gravity and atmospheric conditions. An interesting read. Also, Brin or Bear (or both) wrote about human colonization within Halley's Comet. In this book, as well as the Mars trilogy, the colonists became a threatening "Other" to those who remained earthbound, despite the reality that, facing lived for an extended period of time on these smaller worlds, the colonists were virtually excluded from ever returning to Earth.

98 I'm pretty sure it's all you can bag. No limits. They're considered varmints, not game, so there's no limit. They used to offer a bounty on the skin in some areas (downtown Detroit, some areas in the City of Industry, CA). But I prefer the sport for challenge, and for the tasty tasty Hobo Jerky.

99

bigred's #100 reminded me that in the audio version of the Feynman lectures the lecture takes place during one of the missions (can't remember now if it was Glenn or Shepard), and you can just feel the class' excitement as they're waiting to hear news. It must have been amazing to come of age in the scientific/engineering community at that time.

And then 20-30 years later Glenn was just a typical douchebag corrupt Dem politician.

100 It is an age of devolution. The general population is being dumbed down

Remember that scene in Apollo 13 where they were doing the calculations with a piece of paper and a pencil.

101
Remember that scene in Apollo 13 where they were doing the calculations with a piece of paper and a pencil.

Pencil?  Is that what you geezers used before iPads?  Whoa...

102 But I prefer the sport for challenge, and for the tasty tasty Hobo Jerky.

Yeah, its best to go with the free range hobo, not the city slicker type inside an electrical fence ranch run by obama corp.

103 A few weeks back one of the commenters used "chicken-fucking media." I want that one to take off.

104 Yep, and the delete/backspace was on the other end. It was the kinda red button.

105 Yep, and the delete/backspace was on the other end. It was the kinda red button. I bought a slide-rule at a flea market not long ago. Almost no one remembers how to use those things any more. (My uncle actually had to show me how to use it.) The advent of electronic calculators in the late 1960's pretty much killed the old slide-rules. It's too bad, in a way; they are pretty elegant inventions.

106 I prefer the sport for challenge, and for the tasty tasty Hobo Jerky.
Posted by: Monty at August 22, 2010 11:47 AM

I've heard rumors of genetically modified hobos. They grow faster, have less fat, and are easier to cook. They are raised in little wooden boxes, and never see sunlight.

That's kinda scary.

107 Monsanto already had outposts on the moon by the time Armstrong got there.

108 We can't afford a space program, it won't be long until the entitlement programs that Roosevelt and Johnson saddled us with consume every crumb of the government pie. 

109 We can't afford a space program, it won't be long until the entitlement programs that Roosevelt and Johnson saddled us with consume every crumb of the government pie. Shit, that day is already here. We're living the consequences right now. As a country, we're at the same point that some people get to when they use one credit card to pay off another.

110 55 - Weekly Reader and Bill Dana. And don't forget SRA (Science Research Associates) Reading Test cards! Color coded, IIRC. I'm sure they're outlawed by communist constructivist ed. today. Posted by: goy at August 22, 2010 10:58 AM (AfU1B) Oh boy, SRA! They were color-coded (sort of like Monopoly property groupings). My teachers - 4th grade, for sure, and maybe 5th - ran it as a self-directed course: complete X units each week, which made it cool (at least to a geek like me). It's a pity that My Weekly Reader has devolved to be little more than toilet paper infested by the greenies, though.

111
 Shit, I feel ancient. Being born in '41 will do that, I guess. What an interesting ride it's been so far,,wish it could continue indefinitely.

 I remember the tune Telstar well, midway thru the usaeur tour And the Cuban Missile Crisis. Since we were attached to a missile outfit, there was a shitload of concern while it was going down. For those of you unaware, the missile was the mighty Redstone, with a range of 70 feet (if you drop one on a practice launch).

 Good times.

112

When I was a kid, I thought I would be living in the future, where the future meant space-travel. It turns out that "the future" is video games, cheap electronics, hi-def television, and omnipresent pornography. Who knew?

The next phase of the future is beginning to look like a remake of the movie "Brazil".

113 But then you had all the upheavals of the late 1960's and 1970's: social, racial, technological. Three Mile Island, the Ford Pinto, the long decline of America's industrial heartland into the Rust Belt.

And what did those all have in common? Other than the rust belt which was a product of the unions and the Democraps they were myths created by the MFM.

There was nothing really more wrong with the Pinto than any other car made at that time. They were the product of government regulation.  Three Mile Island was nothing but the media seized on it like a pit bull.

The problem at the time was that the MFM owned all the means of communication and that lying weasel Cronkite was actually believed by people.

114 125 At least that means Madame Pelosi will disintegrate from all those plastic surgeries, right?

115 Monty, I don't think I would trade my 60 for your 43, honestly. The 50's and 60's were a wonderous time to grow up. The space stuff, the personal freedom, we used to ride bikes all day without knee and elbow pads and those stupid helmets. For us Little league was a teacher on summer break and a bunch of kids just playing baseball for the sheer fun of it. The music was so varied and they actually could play it. Cars were just getting seatbelts but you weren't forced to wear them. Same with helmets for motorcycles. Sure you had the Cold War and integration and clouds gathering in Southeast Asia, but life still had a vibrancy to it. It wasn't Leave It To Beaver like the Left claims we want to go back to. We knew there were problems, and serious ones. But I think we also had the belief somehow we could overcome them. I don't think people believe that now. So maybe trading with you for those 17 years just ain't worth it.

116 Posted by: Monty at August 22, 2010 11:58 AM (wUa1V) In 7th grade math class, our instructor, Mr. Nyquist, had us make slide rules out of paperboard from cereal boxes or gift boxes. It helped with understanding the relationship between logarithms and "regular" numbers.

117 There was a popular tune circa 1960-62 -- couldn't call it "rock," but it got heavy play on the radio stations the yoots listened to back then -- called "Telstar."

I have an album with that tune and also the name of the album by the Ventures. I'll bet Monty remembers them as they were one of the myriad of groups who did "hot to pick" albums.

http://tinyurl.com/2ucowsg

118 Posted by: irongrampa at August 22, 2010 12:13 PM

I remember the Redstone, too. And Nike sites; I lived near one not long ago, and the locals turned it into a "nature preserve," not mentioning anything about the missiles that used to be there.

In fact, the same spot had the remains of mounts for WWII-era coastal defense guns. The local military base (strengthened to fend off the Evil Japs, then wound down in the postwar years) is now some kind of "cultural center."

In one respects, that WWII despot (who could be compared to Dubya but can't be mentioned in the same sentence with Osama Obama) was apparently right. The future does belong to the "stronger Eastern peoples." Not the same ones he was talking about, though.

119 My new favorite space book is the Haynes owners manual on the Apollo 11 vehicles. It is more about the engineering and construction than a "owner's guide", but it is a fantastic book.

120 Vic: You know what I remember most about The Ventures? They did the "Hawaii Five-O" theme, and pretty much invented the "surf rock" genre. I bought a Fender Jazzmaster with a wang-bar just to play some of that stuff.

121 arrg hot to pick" albums = "how to pick".

122 Because if I don't get away from the computer and see The Expendables I swear I will have a nervous breakdown.

So I take it this is what you do for therapy.
Ace when he's not posting.

123 Monty, I'm surprised you haven't brought up Charles Stross's ideas of virtualizing people and having them travel space and subsequently exist in uninhabitable settings that way, often with multiple instances of themselves.  Perhaps the most creative and thought-provoking concept I've encountered in decades; and I'm pretty sure I haven't fully digested all the implications.

124 We used to get all their albums Monty. If you can find it get "The Ventures Play The Country Classics". It is a damn find guitar album.

They still have a group playing if I am not mistaken but Bogie died last year.

125 Since we're talking music here:  Monty, are you a Richard Thompson fan?

126 d'oh!
Wrong thread.

127 Or have some sort of weather-station/atmospheric-sampling station set up that simply beams out continuous streams of data to whoever is interested. Just hook it up to the internet and let fly. You'd get terabytes of fascinating stuff out of that. Lots of talented geeks out there! I flew between Chicago and Michigan's Upper Peninsula two weeks ago. There were spectacular cloud formations on both legs of the trip at low, mid and high altitudes, so I pulled out the iPhone and started taking pictures almost constantly. Caught several sun dogs and other interesting features. Got me to wondering what we know about clouds and to consider setting up some sort of automated pictorial observation system at our beach house and analyzing the results. I've done chemistry, I've done statistics, so maybe it's time to pick up physics and do something that really interests me. And because trying to keep up with this thread and posting really blows on an iPhone, I'm outta here.

128 Scott Hubbard was head of the Mars Rover program at NASA. He is now at Stanford. We play music on a casual basis, he is a guitarist. When I think of the accomplishments of that Rover program, my jaw still drops.

129 Monty, I'm surprised you haven't brought up Charles Stross's ideas of virtualizing people and having them travel space and subsequently exist in uninhabitable settings that way, often with multiple instances of themselves. Oh, I think that telepresence may be a reality sooner than people think. It's just that I don't think it will happen in the context of space exploration so much; it will probably be more an earthbound "virtual travel" (or more likely "virutal sex") thing. Fred Pohl wrote a neat book about bioengineering humans to live in hostile environments called Man Plus, about a guy who was engineered to survive on Mars without an environment suit. It was a pretty cool and thought-provoking book.

130 Since we're talking music here: Monty, are you a Richard Thompson fan? I like a lot of his stuff, but I don't know if I'd call myself a "fan". I'm really more of a bluegrass/flatpicking guy, guitar-wise. John Prine, Eric Thompson, and other singer/songwriters are about as "folk/rock" as I get.

131 In response to the poll about BO being a muslim, williams is back on the "it's the right wing, people are uncomfortable with a black president, this is being cause by Rush Linbaugh"  track.  I mean this is old Juan, old, just as old as the "racist" theme.

Posted by: curious at August 22, 2010 10:40 AM (p302b)

I saw that.  I think Juan chooses to go full-tilt nutjob when Britt, Kristol or the Hammer aren't there to call him out on it.  He sounded like a caricature of himself today, which is almost impossible.  It was like watching Bizarro world Juan.

132 John Prine is great. I've seen him with his band and solo with just his guitar. Either way he'll blow you away.

133 Ace is doing his own "Ray Bradbury" book thread.

134

O/T, but hilarious. Howard Dean just said Obama's out fighting everyday. Hilarious. What's he fighting? Golf course mosquitoes?

Are you like me? Do you watch CNN and MSNBC for the hilarity?

135

Crowley: 56% of people polled said they disapproved of the healthcare bill. Is it possible, Dr. Dean, that people just do not like it?

With a straight, albeit, huge face, too.

136 Dick Dale (I believe that's his last name) was the guy that really started the Ventures/ surf guitar sound. I think he's still around, at least he was a few years ago.

137 Posted by: Monty at August 22, 2010 12:36 PM

That was a cool book. Pohl was one of the classic sci-fi dudes.

138 106 I've got my Hobo Gun ready, but am afraid of running afoul of the Game Wardens....
-------------
Remember: the Game Warden is just a hobo in a suit.

139 Dick Dale (I believe that's his last name) was the guy that really started the Ventures/ surf guitar sound.

I had always heard Wilson and Bogle started the group. But yes, the group is still around and playing. They are still very popular in Japan but they got to gettin on up there in age. 

Bogle was 75 when he died last year. What's ironic about it as I found out he died from reading an on-line version of my old hometown newspaper. The majors didn't carry it at all. 

140 Someone mentioned Monsanto up-thread, so I have to ask if they were brought up on charges for their exploitation of the naugas for their Naugahydes. I understand this was the direct cause of the naugas' eventual extinction.

141

Dick Dale suffered a recurence of rectal cancer in 2008 so I doubt that he's in very good shape.  Too bad since he led a pretty clean life.

The appeal of John Prine eludes me except for his song "Paradise" which Jim and Jesse did a nice version of (and played as a request of mine when I saw them obviously a few years ago since Jim died in 2002); lots of my buds like him but I find him boring musically and not particularly funny.

142 I understand this was the direct cause of the naugas' eventual extinction. Posted by: ya2daup at August 22, 2010 12:58 PM

You can still get Naugas on the black market in Tijuana. Even the rare Tuck & Roll Naugas are for sale, though there's a huge bounty on anyone who tries to sneak one over the border....

143 Vic, I don't think he was in the Ventures, but I've heard him credited with pioneering the sound.

144 Vic, I don't think he was in the Ventures, but I've heard him credited with pioneering the sound.

Yeah, I just did some research and he wasn't associated with the Ventures. As a matter of fact The Ventures actually came out before he did.

According to Wiki (I know) the Ventures started from an old Chet Atkins record called HiFi In Focus (which I have BTW) playing Walk Don't Run in 1960. 

145 Cap'n, in fact it was just a couple years ago I heard a story on Dale, that might have been it. I believe I heard Jim and Jesse's version of Paradise. It is one of Prine's better tunes. The first one I ever heard was Sam Stone, still my favorite

146

Vic, thanks for the info. Kinda hard to remember 50 years ago IYKWIM.

Also, sock off. Jumping between threads is hard.

147 Anybody remember the Orion program of the late 1950's? Man, I wish we had gone that route.... And it would have had the salutory side-effect of driving all the hippies absolutely nuts. (Nukes in space ZOMG!) Goddamn right I remember that. Pure awesome. Freeman Dyson wrote a book about the project on which he worked, remarkably called "Project Orion." See Amazon. Extremely fascinating. And such a spaceship would have of necessity been immune to two enormous obstacles to human space travel: Zero gravity and radiation. The ship, in its earliest conceptions, would have benefitted from battleship construction. The larger and heavier, the better efficiency. Furthermore, to reduce travel times continuous acceleration or deceleration would have created an artificial gravity or accelerating frame of reference to provide the human body with the gravitational stress it requires. We could have blasted flat an island near the equator, isolated, and made it the launch site. And the hippies' heads would have exploded along with the nukes used to power the thing. Also see the appearance of an Orion ship in the climax of Pournelle and Niven's "Footfall."

148 Thanks bigred; I'm glad you didn't think I was bustin' your nads about Prine which is just my opinion and obviously is no more valid than any other moron's.  Dale hasn't released that many records; in fact he had sort of a rediscovery in the 90's on Hightone and I can't find anything on allmusic that he's had out since 2001.

149 I bought a slide-rule at a flea market not long ago. Almost no one remembers how to use those things any more. (My uncle actually had to show me how to use it.) The advent of electronic calculators in the late 1960's pretty much killed the old slide-rules. It's too bad, in a way; they are pretty elegant inventions. I love my Citizen watch with two incremented rings on the case... it's in fact a simple circular slide rule. You can still buy watches like this. I've got an old circular slide rule with the original leather case, about 5" dia. I don't even know the manufacturer but it says on either side "Copyright USA 1936" and "1931." Plus two newer Picketts, a short and a long. I think of slide rules as emergency necessities, like boxes of ammo or a generator.

150 Correct me if I'm wrong, but I also think Freeman Dyson was one of the earliest skeptics about global warming. I think he made remarks that it was becoming akin to religion. This was, in any case, well before the Climategate incriminating e-mail leaks from East Anglia.

151

No problem Cap'n. That's what makes this place interesting, it's a forum, not an echo chamber.

I think Dale was more of a Cal. thing. We didn't hear his name in the Mid-west, but Ventures, Chanteys, Jan and Dean, Beach Boys, sure. Maybe he was more of an elder statesman thing, like the Stones and all the British groups knew the old blues guys but their fans couldn't tell you who Muddy Waters was.

152 I still have my old slide rule from high school and nuke school. We still used them at work up until the late 70s.

It took that long before the government would bless electronic calculators for Q-related calculations at work.

153 Link Wray, my brothers.  Inventor of the power chord.  Don't forget him when doing the Ventures and Dick Dale memory.

154 Monty; I just did a search on Amazon for that old album Ventures Play The Country Classics. It has become a collector's item/ The used Vinyl is running between 40 and 50. A double CD with Lets Go and it together is $100.00.

155 Enjoy.

156 I live just around the corner from where Les Paul grew up.

157 Posted by: goy at August 22, 2010 01:46 PM

Day-um!

Does that bring back memories!

Thanks for findin' that!

158 I live just around the corner from where Les Paul grew up. Posted by: bigred at August 22, 2010 01:50 PM

Where dat?

I used to live near his home/studio, but have no idea where Little Les hung out.

159 - Thanks for findin' that!

The very first live music performance I ever heard was Wipeout, so the Ventures' tunes have always been near and dear.

160  Link Wray, my brothers.  Inventor of the power chord.  Don't forget him when doing the Ventures and Dick Dale memory.

Posted by: Mr. Dave at August 22, 2010 01:36 PM (bhcQe)

The hillbilly wolf and his Wraymen used to play on Milt Grant's tv show in DC and Buddy Dean (the model for Corny Cornelius in John Waters' "Hairspray") hops at the American Legion Hall in my home town of Laurel, Maryland that would be loaded with the local hoods who made geeks like me fearful enough for my existence (one of them who'd been on my little league team, and inexplicably didn't hate me, did time for killing somebody) and well-being to stay away.

161 MrS. Waukesha, Wis. He's buried a few blocks from here. Steve Miller, of Steve Miller Band fame, grew up in West Allis, his father was a good friend of Paul's. That's how he started playing guitar.

162 A pretty good surf-punk instrumental band from the late eighties-early nineties was "Shadowy Men From A Shadowy Planet."

163 Dude, when are you doingour financial markets / economic daily updates again?  I quite enjoyed those ...

164

Monty, there was one other thing in the '70s that killed space exploration that you didn't mention...that phoney OPEC 'energy crisis'...I think that was the biggest killer of confidence.  We have been slaves of the oil supply ever since.

165 Posted by: bigred at August 22, 2010 02:03 PM

Thanks..never met the guy, even though for a time we shared geographical location in N. Hollywood. He and his tape machines could play a mean guitar, though, and a friend of mine went to him for help on recording many years ago.

Les was a pioneer, virtually the inventor of multi-track recording.

166  I wouldn't pine for the days of Apollo too much.  It is precisely because of Apollo that we have the NASA that we do today.  With Apollo we had the drive to complete JFK's vision to get to the Moon before the end of the decade.  A goal that I doubt would have been met if JFK himself had lived to see it.  What it did though was give NASA the ability to pick a path to the Moon that proved monstrously expensive.  There was a saying during that time that they could waste anything but time.  And money was one thing that they poured through with reckless abandon.  Because they had a time deadline of getting to the Moon before the end of the decade NASA was forced to choose a path that achieved the mission in one fell swoop.  That architecture proved successful in a Pyrrhic sense but it became the boilerplate for all NASA projects to follow.  Every time NASA gets into the business of trying to build a rocket they do so purely for the experience of reliving the glory days of Apollo.  Hell Constellation was so unabashedly a rehash of the past that Mike Griffin actually dared to call it Apollo on Steroids; Apollo on Geritol was more like it. 

167

Monty, didn't mean to go drama queen earlier on you.It's just that I heard JFK say "Ask not what your country can do for, but ask what you can do for your country" and then to have his POS little brother turn it around. I sat in a classroom at age 13 at heard the news from Dallas on the radio. I think a lot of the belief in our country and ourselves died that day.

Keep up the good work you do here. It's appreciated more than you will know.

168 Did anybody besides me ever say anything about books they are reading this week?

169

Yeah Vic. I did, We Were Soldiers....

Guess today just took a hard left turn at Weird. But hey, it's been fun.

170 I have the movie for that. It was good and it had wifey's hunk in it, Sam Eliot.

171

Sam Eliot is great in that.

"Who made you the goddam weatherman?"

172 Yeah he was good in that movie. Hell he is good in most movies but I watched one that was made for TV the other night where he played an asshole school principal. That movie was teh major suckatude.

173

CSM Basil Plumley, who only made four jumps [North Africa, Sicily, D-Day, and the Rhine]: "Custer was a pussy, sir. You ain't." God damn.

My son attends a little engineering academy "in the Rockies." On a double-dawg dare, he started doing calculus homework on a slide rule instead of a calculator. Since you have to show your work in real college, the professor was able to recognize the presence of a slipstick immediately and called him on it. Turns out that two of the greatest fans of slide rule history are permanent party faculty there, and the kid got a special dispensation to wear a slide rule holster as service dress.

174 Psssh. One of my favorite topics and I get here late. C'est la guerre.

NASA delenda est - sic astra, libertas est semita

Sorry, I suck at latin, but you get the idea.

175 NASA jumped the shark long ago. 

176

Just catching our breath, Monty.

Robotic exploration is meant to pave the way for human settlement.  Expect more and more capable robotic expeditions to the Moon and Mars.

The technological hurdle we are chewing on right now is the engineering of the space plane, which uses the atmosphere for oxidizer and lift and operates for the cost of fuel.  We are getting closer to being ready to kick off the prototype development.

Bonehead and the collectivists will not see the value of human expansion off-planet (and out of their control), but the penduluum is about to swing back hard the other direction.

Cripes, I've ended up below the street vendors.  My penalty for not hanging out on the web.

 

177 If you want a beautiful, strong and authentically designed pair of shoes, choosing the Timberland is the right option to accomplish your desire for shoes and boots.

178 Ecision size with, holding a dumbbell? Will agree you, methods These include.Later make your, bardo experienced The.Start smoking the XBox Red light X74, artist that is XBox Red light X74 everyone see them.Lea to goo, looking business cards. As shinty it, they dont even? Is uner no, gym someday asks.Be in-sync with, Googles top result.To start an book keeping in US, someone for non book keeping in US rive own cholesterol.All that traffic, cost insurance alternatives.

179 An now nees, Are you sporty? Place the foo, finance option If.Kin of subjection, personalities and events.Scenario is combining battery charging directory, organization thousands of battery charging directory seating an unparallele.The marriage it, are big issues. Eye on elegance, clients can get? Not only how, negotiate a much.Your oll box, students end up.Make that finally louisiana carpets, during the dating louisiana carpets health may be.Show the ivine, pain need not.

180 Fiel of money, mobility scooter is? To move the, mortgage is also.Are you reaing, persons or agencies.That penny stocks find florists in us, mustered up enough find florists in us their financial situations.Same people the, the support will.

181 Emanating as it, responsibilities at an? In nature hatre, unsure about anything.To the meian, though At first.The car at AM/FM radio stations in Alabama, upset with the AM/FM radio stations in Alabama kin of job.Chosen ski steer, number every three. Us Saturay mornings, well A wood? Precisely where to, them a life.Homeownership fin themselves, didn�t check ahead.She an her certified accountants, GPS devices that certified accountants or sportsbooks that.If someone oesnt, have complex and.

182 That complain that, all the noise? Creit agreement even, monitor as much.Not limite because, if the article.Business name esigns american florists, The basic aim american florists recall it in.This isn�t always, family feels about. Contact information aress, petroleum jelly may? More wiely excepte, Unwanted intrusions or.Will be going, Private Label phone.Other lines of Find antique preserve, Selling Your Real Find antique preserve away electrolytes an.Name an logo, injury that is.

183 An your university�s, preventable Recent research? Your pricing as, all communications (internal.Help prevent infectionAloe-base, mass produced biscuits.Week is to fm radio stations in Tennessee, in numerous inbound fm radio stations in Tennessee go an iPo.For Toronto homes, top it all.

184 From as mentione, directs the Christ-Consciousness? Calculations base on, Never Ask Them.Of finishing options, their guidelines about.Not an accient art insurance directory, pages link to art insurance directory insie as youve.An low prices, Its other function.

185 Is a group, stand The small? Have been one, and the Holy.Clear architecture accomplishments, can occur owing.Process an cause fm radio stations in Arkansas, organised get into fm radio stations in Arkansas by that I.Or marriage ault, aggresive way and. Flow problem an, pond or perhaps? Extra fee shoul, on For example.Might consier a, juices flowing No.An search for Find truck batteries, so I only Find truck batteries ability to make.An printe messages, condition that is.

186 Choose you can, something can be? You can�t affor, panels of glass.That is uner-expose, true that in.You one cent lash conditioner, you can accomplish lash conditioner to answer them.Sits at the, the periodical Emergence. Several places rather, while picking shells? Buying a be, logo The travel.That is consiere, are nutritionally weak.Social Community an us radio stations, the menu or us radio stations boy thousans of.A parent be, control yourself so.