Suck it NASA

Vastet
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Suck it NASA

By Amina Khan
December 16, 2013, 5:44 p.m.
China’s Chang’e 3 spacecraft successfully touched down on the moon and deployed  the "Jade Rabbit" rover, and now the pair have now sent their first images back to Earth.

The color photographs, which the rover and lander took of each other, elicited applause from the engineers at Beijing Aerospace Command and Control Center.
~
The landing is the first soft landing on the moon since the Soviet Union sent the sample-collecting Luna 24 mission in 1976.

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-china-chang-e-3-lunar-rover-yutu-moon-20131216,0,5735654.story


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Perhaps China is doing

Perhaps China is doing something right that the USA and Canada are not doing(what could it possible be?). The USA is too broke from entitlement/pension payouts to have a much of space program(without borrowing from China). US schools don't produce enough Engineers and technical people either.

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Yeah, China is trying. The

Yeah, China is trying. The US isn't. Hasn't been since Challenger. The US isn't too broke to have a space program worthy of mention, it doesn't care to. Cut the defence budget by 0.0001% and give that money to NASA, and clean NASA up so most of its budget isn't wasted on bureaucracy, and you'd be able to build a base on the moon and a colony on Mars within 10 years.

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Vastet wrote:Yeah, China is

Vastet wrote:
Yeah, China is trying. The US isn't. Hasn't been since Challenger. The US isn't too broke to have a space program worthy of mention, it doesn't care to. Cut the defence budget by 0.0001% and give that money to NASA, and clean NASA up so most of its budget isn't wasted on bureaucracy, and you'd be able to build a base on the moon and a colony on Mars within 10 years.



in the '70s the US decided to switch its focus from long-distance rocket travel to the space shuttle (which cannot make long journeys), orbiting objects like space stations and satellite telescopes, and probes. if we hadn't done that, we would have been on mars by now.


the road the US has taken is not nearly as glamorous as building lunar colonies and human exploration of planets, etc., but it's probably allowed us to know more about the universe than we would have otherwise and it's definitely a more efficient means of finding things out.


i read a review a couple years ago of an alternate history novel where kennedy survives his assassination attempt and continues to pour money into the apollo program and scraps the idea for the space shuttle. apparently, the conclusion of the book is that, sure, we would have had men on other planets for a long time by now, but we would actually know less about thoae planets than we do now because our probes and telescopes are so much more suited to discovery than human explorers.


planetary bases, etc., are sexy and good propaganda, but they're not necessarily the best way to get scientific work done.

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I doubt you could find a

I doubt you could find a single archaeologist who would say the rovers and satellites at Mars have done a fraction of what a few teams of people could have done.
There's also nothing to prevent taking both paths at the same time, except funding. We could easily have a base on the moon and be setting up a colony on Mars without sacrificing a single discovery.
But most important is our species survival, and sending probes into space isn't going to do anything to ensure it. Only sending people will actually give us a better chance.

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