…over at Instapundit. Expect to see a lot of nostalgia not just for the Shuttle, but for the entire way of doing business-as-usual as it’s been done at NASA for the last half century. It ended about forty years too late, but the future is bright now.
8 thoughts on “More End-Of-Shuttle Links”
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I suppose a lot of people don’t like change.
It seems change is very exciting, if you are not specific about the change.
I’ve seen a lot of nostalgia crop up every where. It makes me better understand the appeal of religion. Certainly the Shuttle is inspiring and exciting in a lot of ways, and perhaps it’s better than some alternatives, and that makes it all the more difficult to get people to understand how limited and flawed it is compared to better alternatives.
What we have here is a case study of why government should not do what commercial vendors could do better. It only took about a decade or two for the FAA to figure that out after the breakup of Ma Bell. They were once the fourth largest telecom in the country, but have mostly gone back to purchasing services instead of engineering and building them.
Multiple vendors with other commercial interests are better able to adapt to the always changing environment. Now we will have massive layoffs of those least capable to find work (the best got out of Dodge early.)
Anything anticompetitive is the enemy of overall economic success. Everything government does is anticompetitive. Was it 1934 when govt. decided that rural farmers needed a phone monopoly to fill their needs and drove out of business most of the competition? Nobody tell the government that cell phone providers concentrate growth in high population areas.
A telling picture
http://i.imgur.com/msXS8.jpg
Yeah, thats JOHN NOBLE WILFORD just another uniformed loser.
Move along folks, nothing to see here.
Why are you calling John Noble Wilford a loser? He’s a great science writer.
And I don’t think he wears a uniform.
I actually admire Wilford, I have been reading his articles for years (decades really).
But the article to which you linked called out an article by Wilford talking sadly about the current state of affairs (as related to space policy). I think that what Wilford wrote was as even handed as anyone could expect, but sad at the situation.
The Instapundit article, however, dismissed his opinion and simply said they were more optimistic. You dismissed it as nostalgia (“Expect to see a lot of nostalgia”). That was my point, not an insult to Wilford (who as I said I admire), but to the ‘don’t worry, be happy’ attitude (“the future is bright now”) expressed by you.
“the future is bright now” != “don’t worry, be happy.”
There are many things that Congress could do to screw things up, and they seem determined to do them. We have to keep fighting for a sensible space policy. But we’re a lot closer to one now than we were a couple years ago, and the Shuttle was a barrier to reform.