Land of Oz

Spaced Out - Out of Space?

BBC News: US plans permanent base on Moon.
Here goes NASA again talking about putting a base on the moon. It seems Prez Bush told them to do it - not in the manner of Kennedy, but in his own "style." Here's my uneducated opinion of that. NASA no longer has "the right stuff." Somewhere after Yeager busting the sound barrier and not too long after Apollo 13's bubble gum and wax paper repair job, the right stuff got up and left.

The Shuttle has been a burden since it first took off. It works nothing like it was planned to. A reusable low-cost pickup truck into orbit has become a massively overpriced, fragile elephant, similar to using a Rolls-Royce limo for hauling empty beer cans to a recycle center.

Now we're talking about a station on the moon and we can't even run a station in near earth orbit. We strand three poor folks out there, whose duty, at least to me, seems nothing more than patching and survival (and the occasional orbiting golf ball). This thing was supposed to be completed this year (2006). From what I can figure out, it about's at 30% of what it's supposed to be. And if it wasn't for the Russians and their simple and reliable, 60's technology spacecraft, I'm guessing the ISS would be a slag heap at the bottom of the ocean by now.

As much as I would like to see us go "boldly where no man has gone before," I think we really need to rethink how to do it. The current process isn't going to do it. Why can't we just get together with some of the other big players of the world and make a real Intentional Space Station. That's the only way it's going to work. Instead of everyone going their own way fiddling with this and that, we need to get some inspired politician/bureaucrat and make a real International effort on this. Space is way to big for any one or two countries to get a handle on it.