I have never been a big fan of the International Space Station. After all, this is 2001, we should have space-station colonies, moon colonies, etc. Our space station should have rotating sections to provide artificial gravity for the astronauts so they don't lose bone and muscle mass. (You can still have non-rotating portions for low-g experiments... c'mon!) I guess NASA scientists/politicians just aren't as intelligent as Clarke, et al thought they would be at this point in time.
That said, I don't like the fact that it looks like bad news for the International Space Station right now. OK, so maybe it's not the space station we as a society thought we could come up with in 2001, and maybe it's not /truly/ international. However, it's better than nothing, and it is a step towards destroying my pet pieve of nationalism. So what happens? Now we get a president who is full of the old nationalist dunghill. Since the ISS is an international thing, it was a given that he'd try to cut it. So, now he is. (U.S. Modules Face the Axe) Surprise surprise. So, what goes? Habitation module, crew return vehicle (CRV) and propulsion module. So, basically we're relying on fifteen year old Russian technology for some of the most critical parts of the station. We should have just added on to Mir in the first place if we were going to do that. It would have saved a lot of money and planning and etc. This was one of my major complaints about the ISS, namely that the station wasn't different enough to warrant creating a new station. Now, they're cutting out the parts that they used to justified starting from scratch? BRILLIANT!
OK, so maybe it is a good idea for the government to save the money. So, we're afraid the ISS will be $4 billion over budget. So, let's save that money. What will we do with the money we save? Well, why don't we spend $20 billion on a new Missile Defense Program! To borrow from Homer Simpson, "D'Oh! D'Oh! D'Oh! D'Oh! D'Oh! I mean, 'Woohoo'!"
Maybe Perry is right and humanity shouldn't be allowed to govern itself. *sigh*
00:00 - 2001-03-02
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