TartPops, have you ever read a book that wasn’t written by Bill Bryson? You keep citing him like he’s the be-all and end-all of knowledge about the space program. Have you considered looking into any books about space written by people who actually works in some field more directly related to the space program than a guy who’s chief claim to fame is being a professional tourist?
Wouldn’t a push to the moon create jobs?
For the record, the $450 billion figure for a manned mission to Mars came from a committee proposal solicited by Bush the Elder, and shows what happens when every single department in the bureaucracy gets to write a chapter to financially justify their various projects as being part of the overall program. Bob Zubrin, the iconoclastic but technically gifted space evangelist behind the “Mars Direct” concept, calls the $450 billion plan “Battlestar Galactica.” Read his book The Case for Mars to see an alternative approach that he claims would cost $20 billion but that I think he’s low-balling by twenty-five percent which is still a freakin’ bargain.
And re the potential Bush announcement, this makes one item in his favor, with several quadzillion still against. This stuff just makes me moist.
It wasn’t a lie, and I do apologize. Not to appease you, I may add, but because I do have more emotional maturity than a fourteen year old. I still think you’re a fucking moron.
Hell yeah we can afford it. Just looking at how much we spend on Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and all the billions that disappear into black budgets - building a base on the moon is easy and chump change. Heck, going to Mars is chump change.
Well, I see Tarty has been banned. What happened? Returning troll?
This thread was started by a returning troll, so I’m closing it. Y’all can continue to debate the merits of the space program and how it should be funded in GD, or continue to bash Bush in the Pit, but not in this thread.
Lynn
For the Straight Dope