Is it just me or is NASA's new mission to "reach out to Muslim nations to help them feel good about their contributions to math and science and engineering" a HUGE waste of time and money! Not only that, I think it's very condescending of NASA to even have this initiative. To me it come across and NASA begin like a big brother and saying "don't cry Muslim nations, see look at all the cool stuff you've accomplished, like inventing number and stuff, see you're cool, I swear." To go along with that, what accomplishments have "Muslim nations" brought to math, science and engineering in the last say 1000 years? It seems to me, and I could be wrong, most advancements in those fields comes from Europe, America, Japan, etc. How many Noble Prizes in Physics has someone from a "Muslim nation" won? No idea.
Not only is it condescending but why the heck is this NASA's role? So we go from the shuttle missions to NO MISSIONS AT ALL, because the Constellation rockets are scrapped, to diplomatic roles across the world. Wouldn't it be more diplomatic if NASA BUILT SOMETHING that the world could get behind? Just saying. I'm no genius but not having a shuttle replacement was extremely stupid in my opinion. Having more and more private exploration is looking better and better and getting all of this government bureaucracy out of the way so we can actually do something.
Here's the article
Funny enough, government bureaucracy is what got NASA started in the first place. It's also what built the Saturn V, got us to the moon, built the space shuttle, etc. The government pumped in billions and had their hands all over the space program during the Cold War.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds to me like this "new mission" is simply an outreach program of sorts. And beyond that, people are bitching, but they have no concrete details as to what this all exactly entails. /shrug People are acting like NASA is going to drop everything and start talking about how the invention of algebra was the greatest thing of all-time. We all know that's hardly the way it'll go down.
The shuttle has been on the chopping block for years...that's not an "Obama decision" as some would have you believe. Viable alternatives have been conceptualized, tested, and scrapped for the last 20 yrs.
Privatizing the industry will help, but I don't think you'll see much outside of unmanned space flights in the near future...rovers, telescopes, etc. It costs a LOT of money to just "build something" and quite frankly, that's money the whole world doesn't have right now, lol.
The farther away from Earth we want to go, the more international cooperation is probably going to be required. If anything, maybe some of these oil rich countries will contribute money to future international space missions, if they can't contribute physically in some fashion. Nothing wrong with putting a hand out in friendship, no?
btw...hi Chris! tell April Nina and I said hello too. :-p
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