Reply #32: Very mixed feelings

[ldoolin]

On the one hand, I'm a big fan of the old Apollo missions. "The Right Stuff" has a prominent place in my DVD collection and a number of books about the space program are on my bookshelf. The whole thing had a certain spirit about it that fit with the New Frontier of JFK. I was also a Space Shuttle fan - at first.

On the other hand, I also recognize that my being a fan of NASA and the Apollo program is naive. After all, the space program has been at least as much a military program as a scientific one, and I suspect that a lot of rather suspect interests, from the Pentagon to Repuke-aligned corporations, have their eye on space, with militarization and resource extraction in mind. I also recognize that NASA itself is not a particularly benign agency. At the very best, it probably qualifies as a wasteful government pork program that continues to eat up dollars that should better be spent on health care and education.

So my feelings are very mixed. I guess you could say my views on space are unabashedly partisan. I look fondly back on the space program, warts and all, from back when it was liberal Democrats running the country (JFK and LBJ). Today, B*s* is not to be trusted and neither are his motives for wanting to go back to the moon, the Space Shuttle was obsolete by the late 1980s and should have been scrapped long ago, and NASA itself needs to go on the chopping block. We've already been to the moon and the old space program of the 1960s served its purpose. What's the purpose today?