Message posted by Andre' M. Dall'au on May 10, 2014 at 8:22:29 PST:
I am amazed at the ease and lack of outrage that after the expense, loss of life and tremendous experience of developing manned spaceflight to the point that we not only went to the moon, but did so with computers that were lesser in ability than what any fourteen year old girl's cellphone has today, that Americans have accepted that we can no longer can place a man into orbit as a nation. Even Russia is rubbing our nose in it saying that we should use a "trampoline" if we object to their politics but still want to beg rides on their man-rated vehicles. The Orbiter (Space Shuttle) was a step backwards as it was only capable to insert loads into low earth orbits, but now we have to go to the Russians hat-in-hand to please, please, please give us a seat (at millions of dollars a person thank you very much) aboard a rocket to exchange personnel on the ISS. How degrading. So where is the American outrage over that we will fund every sort of expensive political-driven entitlement, welfare and tax money giveaway program, even those like the failed "war on poverty" (the percentage of poor in America was 15% in the sixties and it is the same today), but we won't continue the one bright spot, the singular American achievement, the US Manned Space program? Why? Where is the millions of Americans who love Sci Fi but refuse to write their congressman or president to demand that we keep NASA's manned space program fully funded and demand a follow-on to the Space Shuttle program? Yes it is cool to watch the NASA 747 or one of the Orbiters as it gets dragged around or on display as yet another dead dinosaur, but the real crime is like the SR-71 where we managed to gather the best and the brightest to produce something that no-where else on earth could match, and then instead of taking what we learned and making even greater strides and pushing the boundaries further and further, Americans have allowed the politicians to shut our aerospace industry down to a mere fraction of what it was and an infinitesimal amount of where we could be. We need less trolls and lurkers and more Americans to step up and get mad that our spaceflight capability is now all either in the hands of the Russians or sitting on slowly rotting tires sitting in museums. Really people, have we all really chosen to sacrifice that much of our greatness?
In Reply to: Houston - Air Museums posted by Scott on May 09, 2014 at 13:03:59 PST:
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