Should space exploration be left up to the government and not private enterprise? That's exactly what I'm saying. And I am certain it will be. The only question is, which government? If I had to bet on whose space agency launches the first moon base, I would bet on China's. But the publicly-financed European Space Agency is making progress too; ESA's funding comes from member countries based on proportions of their gross national product. Meanwhile, when the Chinese or ESA astronauts are building a moon lab, we'll be playing around, spending billions to help some penny-antie company experiment with the sort of capsule that has been around for many decades. A full-throttle commitment to space exploration is necessarily for such a huge enterprise. Like fighting a war, it can't be left to privatization. Any profits from a private space company will be paper only, hiding the substantial infusion of tax funds. We will pay for private space use, regardless of what the politicians and company owners call it. If a private company is used to launch supplies to the space station, the costs of sending those supplies will come from tax dollars, so how does that benefit us? For 50 years space exploration has been a fine inducement for Americans to get into the sciences. I don't think many kids are dreaming about doing space science for some corporation. Unless the American people as a whole decide to back space exploration as it should be, we'll do a lousy job and someone else will do it better. -- Thanks, Joe --- On Thu, 12/9/10, Patrick Wiggins <paw@wirelessbeehive.com> wrote:
From: Patrick Wiggins <paw@wirelessbeehive.com> Subject: [Utah-astronomy] Privatization (Was: SpaceX “Secret” Payload) To: "Utah Astronomy" <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Date: Thursday, December 9, 2010, 4:57 PM Joe, are you saying you feel that space exploration should be left up to government and not private enterprise?
patrick
On 09 Dec 2010, at 14:40, Joe Bauman wrote:
Space X wants Congress to fund it with an additional $1 billion so it can work some safety features into the program. Excuse me, but didn't Congress pay for NASA to do that decades ago? We're reinventing the wheel at the expense of the greatest space program the world has ever known. And yet people find it impressive that Space X can do what NASA did 50 years ago? All this blather about private enterprise doing the job for less doesn't make much sense, does it? -- Joe
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