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[dherblay]

In my years of reading through the blogosphere, my proudest moment has to be the one in which Jim Henley quoted me. He hasn't done so recently, but last night he might as well have:[Steven] Weinberg makes a plausible-sounding case that the Mars program, vaporware or not, is already cutting into NASA's science budget. He misses the obvious

Comments

He's back!

[masqthephlsphr]

The world cowers in fright cheers at the magnificent d'Horrible!

Here comes the Devil's advocate.

[cactuswatcher]

I have about as much faith in the fundamentalists, as I do in contemporary experimental cosmologists. Every time they look deeper the current predictions turn out to be all wrong. Just how many times have we heard them say "We were surprised."? All the time, right? That's not a good sign. Instead of stopping and thinking about whether the whole big bang theory might have some serious flaws, they run to the next room do some quick math and emerge saying they predicted it all correctly, after all. I have as much problem with cosmetologists (sic) wasting the Hubble's precious time, as I do with a mad dash to have a man on Mars. At least, in my life time, I've seen the benefits of the fall out of a 'space race.' After all there is little chance any of us would have any contact with each other if the dash to the moon hadn't forced the drastic reduction of size and efficiency of computer equipment. Once microprocessors existed as a toy for dauntingly expensive government projects, there were plenty of businesses wanting to sell them

Re: Here comes the Devil's advocate.

[dherblay]

I'm not sure that we aren't on two different lines on the same page. I would have no problem with a manned mission to Mars if I accepted that the administration had any real commitment to it -- but, after all, a week after the White House first made noise about the possibility of mounting a new push into space, it went unmentioned in the State of the Union address -- and if it weren't being done at the expense of space science -- which means, by the way, not just deep space but planetary astronomy.

Of course, I was two when we stopped going to the moon, and the NASA project that became most iconic in my upbringing was Voyager, not Apollo, so I have a certain respect for impractical knowledge.