If it weren’t for that fiasco at The American Spectator yesterday, this would take the prize for the week, if not the month.
After reading this "Billionaires' Space Club" piece, I can only assume Slate's editors are taking this week off. http://t.co/eZFGoyLofB
— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) December 30, 2014
No, no, no! You’re completely misunderstanding what a breakthrough this piece represents! The author used a time machine to go back to 2007 to gather his facts, then returned to report them. It’s not journalism; it’s a technology demonstrator.
BTW, you’ve got a link to your previous post about the Atlantic article in the reference to the American Spectator.
Pretty much par for the course for Slate. View everything through a political lens, and you’re going to walk into a lot of walls. Reality, including economics, doesn’t really care about what you want to believe.
If so you’d expect Slate readers to endorse it, when in fact the comments are mainly contemptuous of Charles Seife’s piece of rubbish.
Probably 95% or more of space activities aren’t about space exploration. As of right now, it’s true that Musk and Bezos aren’t doing space exploration. Musk wants to go to Mars, which sounds pretty space explory to me. However, as of now, he’s providing launch services for space exploitation. And there’s not a damn thing wrong with that.
Communications satellites aren’t doing space exploration.
Military satellites like GPS and SBIRS aren’t doing space exploration.
Weather satellites aren’t doing space exploration.
All those Earth monitoring satellites aren’t doing space exploration.
The ISS isn’t doing space exploration, either.
In fact, perhaps the Hubble and other astronomy satellites are the only ones orbiting the Earth that can be considered doing space exploration.
About the only things actually doing space exploration are those probes and satellites analyzing distant planets, asteroids, and a comet, plus two Mars rovers.
The ISS isn’t doing space exploration, either… the only things actually doing space exploration are those probes and satellites
You are redefining terms to fit your own agenda.
Exploration does not mean sitting home watching television. It has never meant that, for thousands of years. It’s not the way impartial groups like the Explorers Club use the term, even today.
Ok smartass, let’s hear your definition of space exploration. That should be good for a laugh.
A good dictionary might help you.
Exploration is “travel for the purpose of discovery.”
Space exploration is space travel for purposes of discovery.
Paradoxical laughter may be a symptom of pseudobulbar affect, or PBA. Your physician can prescribe drugs to treat it. 🙂
Wasn’t project Apollo about ego? Our national ego, and Kennedy’s personal ego?
Who cares whether billionaires are motivated by ego, as long as they produce results? Many of the best hospitals are named after wealthy donors. Should people avoid them as a result?
“We shall do this and those other things, not because they are easy . . .”
Ted Sorensen’s ego?
Everybody does what they want with the resources they have. Others think they can make sense of it. Let ’em try… it’s another source of amusement.
Finally tracked down the American Spectator piece by Hal Colebatch that I presume Rand is talking about. Setting aside the numerous factual errors, it seems to boil down to this: America’s space program is a disaster because it isn’t backing another Apollo-style program using Apollo-style procurement backed by Apollo-style budgets, and the Chinese are going to own the Moon because Obama is too busy using NASA to give therapy to Islamic militants. Or something like that.
Fortunately, most of the combox responses seem to have figured out what a mess that piece is, and are struck by his complete apparent unawareness of Newspace.
today the U.S. has no reliable launch vehicles of its own
What? I guess all those satellites, planetary probes, and ISS resupply vehicles just levitate themselves.
Oh, here’s the link.