Box hauler
Well-Known Member
Haha
Chinese land on the moon
- Thread starter scooter2525
- Start date
hook_dupin
Well-Known Member
Foreign financing or off shoring manufacturing are different issues than the lack of imagination or creativity among Americans.
The Chinese are growing up... but that doesn't necessarily mean Americans are falling down.
A Life Aloft
Well-Known Member
We can have all the imagination in the world, but when the majority of the end result- the jobs and manufacturing/production goes to China and other countries abroad that is a huge loss for this country. It isn't just foreign financing, it's foreign countries now owning or owning a large part of companies as well and being heavily investing to the point of having more control. It's the fact that we can no longer do it better and less expensively. Starbucks moving manufacturing of ceramic mugs back to the United States, which added eight jobs, isn't going to cut it. China is and will be upping it's game. I fully expect their manufacturing processes in the next decade or two, to become far more technological and look like the plants in Japan for example. It's not going to be cheap shirts and jeans. They have the resources, the money, and the incentives. Something this country is lacking. In just a few years China's economy will dwarf ours.
Last year we exported 110 billion in goods which was hired than we have done in the last several years. We imported from China however, a whopping 425 billion in goods. And the majority of those imports came from US companies sending the raw materials to China to produce products for them. China has currently the third largest economy on the planet and we OWE them close to 1.5 trillion in debt, a quarter of our public debt.
China has a lot to learn, but they are doing so and wil continue to do so at a quickening pace. We won't even get into their untapped natural resources.
This is an interesting article in regards to aviation manufacturing and China;
Jul 30, 2013 Its Presence Grows as it Takes – and Invests – in a World View
"Look upwards, and one will see – not aerobatics, but more Chinese flags than ever fluttering gently in the breeze here at AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Look down, and China has a fast-growing presence in U.S. general aviation, underscored with a national pavilion here and another sponsored by the province of Shandong. Look even more closely and one sees Chinese labeling on an Enstrom 280FX helicopter following the company’s acquisition by China’s Chongqing Helicopter Investment Co., last December.
The drumbeat is relentless. China, in its preparation to meet the pent-up demands of a dammed-up domestic market for general aviation, is buying up general aviation in the West at an ever-increasing rate.
Cirrus. Continental aircraft engines. Epic Aircraft. Superior AirParts. Thielert diesel engines. Brantly, and Enstrom Helicopters. All are now Chinese-owned. Count China as a recently-announced major investor in the ICON light sport aircraft, whose airframes will now be made by Chinese-owned Cirrus, albeit in the U.S. And Chinese money is also bringing the single-engined Cirrus Vision jet to market.
Cirrus CEO Dale Klapmeier notes that owner China Aviation Industry General Aircraft (CAIGA) is committed to supporting the company ’s development efforts, and that the Vision is among several products on the drawing table. While he would not specify details, he said yesterday, “We do have plans. We know what . . . we want next; we know what the airframes are. We have a growth path.”
Chinese companies build the Cessna Skycatcher, and will soon be sending Cessna business jets out of their doors. They are already turning out Cessna Caravans.
In Shandong province, Bin Ao Aircraft Industry Co. has built 96 complete Diamond DA40D four-place single-engined diesel-powered light aircraft out of orders for 235, and is now supplying composite airframes to Austria-Diamond as required, and components to the European company’s Canadian operation. All Chinese-built, completed and ordered Diamonds are for Chinese flight schools; all are powered by Centurion diesel engines made by Thielert. That company was acquired last week by Chinese AVIC’s Continental engines subsidiary.
“We have 66% of the Chinese four-seat market between 2008-13 with the Diamond DA-40D aircraft, compared with 34% for Cessna and Cirrus together,” says Li Long, assistant to the general manager and head of sales for Bin Ao, at Oshkosh. Sales campaigns are now underway for the first exports, to Vietnam, Thailand and South Korea, he says.
China’s Yuneec International has taken a step back from aspirations it could flood the world with FAA certified electric-powered aircraft; instead it has gone into partnership with California-based GreenWing International to sell the eSpyder and e430 ultralight kits in the U.S. as experimental light-sport-aircraft kits. In a surprise announcement at AirVenture, GreenWing opened up the order book for the mostly-Chinese-built kits at $39,990. Plans call for the aircraft to be LSA-certified once the FAA grants exemptions to its LSA rules that require a reciprocating engine; an electric engine is currently not allowed under that rule.
GE Aviation will use AirVenture to announce today with its Chinese partners the first, and maybe only service center in China for the new H80 turboprop engine that will power aircraft in that country, including the Thrush 501G crop duster and the single-engined Primus 150 executive aircraft built by AVIC’s CAIGA. GE is well ahead on anticipated demand: the third Thrush 501G out of on an initial order of six is currently en-route to China, and the Primus 150 should make its first flight this year."
Beech whose deal sale for Hawker to China collapsed this year, is once again for sale. Cessna parent Textron is one of the companies looking at them. It will be interesting to see what happens.
Last year we exported 110 billion in goods which was hired than we have done in the last several years. We imported from China however, a whopping 425 billion in goods. And the majority of those imports came from US companies sending the raw materials to China to produce products for them. China has currently the third largest economy on the planet and we OWE them close to 1.5 trillion in debt, a quarter of our public debt.
China has a lot to learn, but they are doing so and wil continue to do so at a quickening pace. We won't even get into their untapped natural resources.
This is an interesting article in regards to aviation manufacturing and China;
Jul 30, 2013 Its Presence Grows as it Takes – and Invests – in a World View
"Look upwards, and one will see – not aerobatics, but more Chinese flags than ever fluttering gently in the breeze here at AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Look down, and China has a fast-growing presence in U.S. general aviation, underscored with a national pavilion here and another sponsored by the province of Shandong. Look even more closely and one sees Chinese labeling on an Enstrom 280FX helicopter following the company’s acquisition by China’s Chongqing Helicopter Investment Co., last December.
The drumbeat is relentless. China, in its preparation to meet the pent-up demands of a dammed-up domestic market for general aviation, is buying up general aviation in the West at an ever-increasing rate.
Cirrus. Continental aircraft engines. Epic Aircraft. Superior AirParts. Thielert diesel engines. Brantly, and Enstrom Helicopters. All are now Chinese-owned. Count China as a recently-announced major investor in the ICON light sport aircraft, whose airframes will now be made by Chinese-owned Cirrus, albeit in the U.S. And Chinese money is also bringing the single-engined Cirrus Vision jet to market.
Cirrus CEO Dale Klapmeier notes that owner China Aviation Industry General Aircraft (CAIGA) is committed to supporting the company ’s development efforts, and that the Vision is among several products on the drawing table. While he would not specify details, he said yesterday, “We do have plans. We know what . . . we want next; we know what the airframes are. We have a growth path.”
Chinese companies build the Cessna Skycatcher, and will soon be sending Cessna business jets out of their doors. They are already turning out Cessna Caravans.
In Shandong province, Bin Ao Aircraft Industry Co. has built 96 complete Diamond DA40D four-place single-engined diesel-powered light aircraft out of orders for 235, and is now supplying composite airframes to Austria-Diamond as required, and components to the European company’s Canadian operation. All Chinese-built, completed and ordered Diamonds are for Chinese flight schools; all are powered by Centurion diesel engines made by Thielert. That company was acquired last week by Chinese AVIC’s Continental engines subsidiary.
“We have 66% of the Chinese four-seat market between 2008-13 with the Diamond DA-40D aircraft, compared with 34% for Cessna and Cirrus together,” says Li Long, assistant to the general manager and head of sales for Bin Ao, at Oshkosh. Sales campaigns are now underway for the first exports, to Vietnam, Thailand and South Korea, he says.
China’s Yuneec International has taken a step back from aspirations it could flood the world with FAA certified electric-powered aircraft; instead it has gone into partnership with California-based GreenWing International to sell the eSpyder and e430 ultralight kits in the U.S. as experimental light-sport-aircraft kits. In a surprise announcement at AirVenture, GreenWing opened up the order book for the mostly-Chinese-built kits at $39,990. Plans call for the aircraft to be LSA-certified once the FAA grants exemptions to its LSA rules that require a reciprocating engine; an electric engine is currently not allowed under that rule.
GE Aviation will use AirVenture to announce today with its Chinese partners the first, and maybe only service center in China for the new H80 turboprop engine that will power aircraft in that country, including the Thrush 501G crop duster and the single-engined Primus 150 executive aircraft built by AVIC’s CAIGA. GE is well ahead on anticipated demand: the third Thrush 501G out of on an initial order of six is currently en-route to China, and the Primus 150 should make its first flight this year."
Beech whose deal sale for Hawker to China collapsed this year, is once again for sale. Cessna parent Textron is one of the companies looking at them. It will be interesting to see what happens.
A Life Aloft
Well-Known Member
As far as creativity.....I think this is also an interesting read:
http://blogs.wgbh.org/innovation-hub/2013/12/6/china-becoming-more-creative-us/
"In the face of rising Chinese power and influence, Americans have often placated themselves with the argument that our democratic society will always come out ahead when it comes to creativity and innovation. So then why was the company that filed the most patents last year a Chinese telecommunications company, ZTE? Eamonn Fingleton, journalist and author of “In the Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony,” says free societies do not necessarily produce more creative thinkers.
The fundamental issue, Fingleton says, is that we’ve gotten the relationship between creativity and wealth all wrong: wealth builds creativity, not the other way around. What that means is that it doesn’t take a free, democratic society to foster creativity. In fact, Fingleton points out that a number of restrictive, authoritarian regimes – Mesopotamia, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union among them – were highly creative.
So what does it take? Money -- specifically, money funneled into research and development. Indeed, that’s the path China has taken, despite its communist regime, which is why companies like ZTE have become such powerhouses of creative output.
Is there any creative domain where America still comes out on top? America’s universities still reign as the world’s leaders in science and math. But increasingly, Fingleton notes, the students in those universities have not been Americans, but international students who often leave the country after they graduate. America’s best hope, Fingleton says, is to look toward other nations previously on the verge of eclipse – like Japan and Germany – and study the steps they have taken to revive their economies."
More food for thought:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/sunday-review/america-the-innovative.html?_r=0
Few of the most creative societies of the ancient world were free. Certainly not Mesopotamia or Egypt. As for the spectacular creativity of early modern Europe, this somehow flourished alongside bloodcurdling efforts at mind control. More recently, both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with authoritarian cultures, punched well above their weight in innovation.
Even the evidence of America’s own history undercuts the “all you need is freedom” story. Though from the start freedom was central to the country’s political culture, Americans have not always ranked as technological leaders. America’s technological coming of age was remarkably recent. As Ralph Gomory, former head of I.B.M.’s research department pointed out to me in an interview, America was noted up to the 1930s mainly as an inspired adapter of other nations’ technologies — a role similar to that of Japan and other East Asian nations in more recent times.
Throughout history, rich nations have gotten to the future first. Their companies can afford to equip their tinkerers and visionaries with the most advanced materials, instruments and knowledge.
This raises an epochal question: as China becomes richer, is it destined to pass the United States as the world’s most inventive nation? The question is all the more pertinent because many experts contend that America’s inventive spirit is already flagging. As the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel put it to me in an interview, American innovation in recent decades has been remarkably narrowly based. “It has been confined largely to information technology and financial services,” he said. “By contrast in transportation, for instance, we are hardly more advanced today than we were 40 years ago. The story is similar in treating cancer.”
Rob Atkinson, president of the Washington-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, points out that China is rapidly ramping up its research spending. “The Chinese have the ability to throw a lot of resources at this, and some will stick to the wall,” he says.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, China’s research spending increased from 0.9 percent of gross domestic product in 2000 to 1.7 percent in 2009. Meanwhile, China’s total number of researchers in R&D more than doubled from 2000 to 2007. During that period in the United States, the number of researchers in R&D grew less than 10 percent.
The Battelle Institute, based in Columbus, Ohio, predicts that China may pass the United States in R&D spending by 2023.
Meanwhile the evidence of international patent filings is looking increasingly ominous. According to data compiled by the World Intellectual Property Organization, the world’s single most prolific filer of international patents as of 2011 was ZTE, a Chinese telecommunications corporation. Its filings were up an astounding fivefold from 2009. Another Chinese corporation, Huawei, moved up to third in the 2011 league table. The only United States corporation to make the Top 10 was Qualcomm. All this is the more troubling because United States patent law has now been drastically weakened. Congress has made it much harder for small American inventors to protect their intellectual property from infringement and theft.
Another concern is that American corporations have been moving their R&D operations offshore. According to the National Science Foundation, fully 27 percent of all employees in United States multinational corporations’ research departments were based abroad as of 2009, up from 16 percent in 2004.
China seems to be benefiting from the trend. Both Intel and Applied Materials are developing major research facilities there. According to Paul Michel, a former federal appellate judge who is an authority on patent law, these operations will be larger than anything either corporation has in the United States. He adds: “Most of the staff in these labs will be Chinese, and undoubtedly many of the resulting manufacturing jobs will be located in China.”
But if East Asian culture is not a serious hindrance to technological creativity — and presumably neither Intel nor Applied Materials think it is — why are East Asian scientists and engineers generally typecast as underachievers? Part of the explanation is that there are different kinds of technological creativity. Fundamental breakthroughs generate headlines and win Nobel Prizes, but as Ralph Gomory pointed out, it is the more mundane task of turning breakthroughs into affordable products that matters economically. East Asian corporations tend to focus on this second task, and though the details of their “continuous improvement” in production technology are rarely noted in the press, their success has been a driver of the region’s spectacular enrichment in the last 60 years.
James Wilsdon, a British professor who has studied Chinese technological creativity, sees a parallel between China’s scientific agenda and its sporting one. China ranked a distant 11th for the number of gold medals at the Seoul Olympics in 1988. Twenty years later, it topped the table.
“If this is what China can achieve in sport,” he said, “how quickly can it become a leader in science and innovation?”
http://blogs.wgbh.org/innovation-hub/2013/12/6/china-becoming-more-creative-us/
"In the face of rising Chinese power and influence, Americans have often placated themselves with the argument that our democratic society will always come out ahead when it comes to creativity and innovation. So then why was the company that filed the most patents last year a Chinese telecommunications company, ZTE? Eamonn Fingleton, journalist and author of “In the Jaws of the Dragon: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Hegemony,” says free societies do not necessarily produce more creative thinkers.
The fundamental issue, Fingleton says, is that we’ve gotten the relationship between creativity and wealth all wrong: wealth builds creativity, not the other way around. What that means is that it doesn’t take a free, democratic society to foster creativity. In fact, Fingleton points out that a number of restrictive, authoritarian regimes – Mesopotamia, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union among them – were highly creative.
So what does it take? Money -- specifically, money funneled into research and development. Indeed, that’s the path China has taken, despite its communist regime, which is why companies like ZTE have become such powerhouses of creative output.
Is there any creative domain where America still comes out on top? America’s universities still reign as the world’s leaders in science and math. But increasingly, Fingleton notes, the students in those universities have not been Americans, but international students who often leave the country after they graduate. America’s best hope, Fingleton says, is to look toward other nations previously on the verge of eclipse – like Japan and Germany – and study the steps they have taken to revive their economies."
More food for thought:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/sunday-review/america-the-innovative.html?_r=0
Few of the most creative societies of the ancient world were free. Certainly not Mesopotamia or Egypt. As for the spectacular creativity of early modern Europe, this somehow flourished alongside bloodcurdling efforts at mind control. More recently, both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with authoritarian cultures, punched well above their weight in innovation.
Even the evidence of America’s own history undercuts the “all you need is freedom” story. Though from the start freedom was central to the country’s political culture, Americans have not always ranked as technological leaders. America’s technological coming of age was remarkably recent. As Ralph Gomory, former head of I.B.M.’s research department pointed out to me in an interview, America was noted up to the 1930s mainly as an inspired adapter of other nations’ technologies — a role similar to that of Japan and other East Asian nations in more recent times.
Throughout history, rich nations have gotten to the future first. Their companies can afford to equip their tinkerers and visionaries with the most advanced materials, instruments and knowledge.
This raises an epochal question: as China becomes richer, is it destined to pass the United States as the world’s most inventive nation? The question is all the more pertinent because many experts contend that America’s inventive spirit is already flagging. As the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel put it to me in an interview, American innovation in recent decades has been remarkably narrowly based. “It has been confined largely to information technology and financial services,” he said. “By contrast in transportation, for instance, we are hardly more advanced today than we were 40 years ago. The story is similar in treating cancer.”
Rob Atkinson, president of the Washington-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, points out that China is rapidly ramping up its research spending. “The Chinese have the ability to throw a lot of resources at this, and some will stick to the wall,” he says.
According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, China’s research spending increased from 0.9 percent of gross domestic product in 2000 to 1.7 percent in 2009. Meanwhile, China’s total number of researchers in R&D more than doubled from 2000 to 2007. During that period in the United States, the number of researchers in R&D grew less than 10 percent.
The Battelle Institute, based in Columbus, Ohio, predicts that China may pass the United States in R&D spending by 2023.
Meanwhile the evidence of international patent filings is looking increasingly ominous. According to data compiled by the World Intellectual Property Organization, the world’s single most prolific filer of international patents as of 2011 was ZTE, a Chinese telecommunications corporation. Its filings were up an astounding fivefold from 2009. Another Chinese corporation, Huawei, moved up to third in the 2011 league table. The only United States corporation to make the Top 10 was Qualcomm. All this is the more troubling because United States patent law has now been drastically weakened. Congress has made it much harder for small American inventors to protect their intellectual property from infringement and theft.
Another concern is that American corporations have been moving their R&D operations offshore. According to the National Science Foundation, fully 27 percent of all employees in United States multinational corporations’ research departments were based abroad as of 2009, up from 16 percent in 2004.
China seems to be benefiting from the trend. Both Intel and Applied Materials are developing major research facilities there. According to Paul Michel, a former federal appellate judge who is an authority on patent law, these operations will be larger than anything either corporation has in the United States. He adds: “Most of the staff in these labs will be Chinese, and undoubtedly many of the resulting manufacturing jobs will be located in China.”
But if East Asian culture is not a serious hindrance to technological creativity — and presumably neither Intel nor Applied Materials think it is — why are East Asian scientists and engineers generally typecast as underachievers? Part of the explanation is that there are different kinds of technological creativity. Fundamental breakthroughs generate headlines and win Nobel Prizes, but as Ralph Gomory pointed out, it is the more mundane task of turning breakthroughs into affordable products that matters economically. East Asian corporations tend to focus on this second task, and though the details of their “continuous improvement” in production technology are rarely noted in the press, their success has been a driver of the region’s spectacular enrichment in the last 60 years.
James Wilsdon, a British professor who has studied Chinese technological creativity, sees a parallel between China’s scientific agenda and its sporting one. China ranked a distant 11th for the number of gold medals at the Seoul Olympics in 1988. Twenty years later, it topped the table.
“If this is what China can achieve in sport,” he said, “how quickly can it become a leader in science and innovation?”
Last edited:
ScorpionStinger
Well-Known Member
National pride for China..... It's effect will motivate and inspire the youthful generation, much like our space race inspired our nation.
In terms of Aviation,much like our industry in 1970's; China will have to go through it's own version of deregulation.It's moving along at a much slower pace than the U.S. did. But for the Chinese innovation to grow as much as the U.S. did, their Government will have to get out of Chinese corporations way to spur innovation. Their government will need further reform away from socialism. India is further along on that aspect than China. INDIA is a sleeping giant that will compete with China.
In terms of Aviation,much like our industry in 1970's; China will have to go through it's own version of deregulation.It's moving along at a much slower pace than the U.S. did. But for the Chinese innovation to grow as much as the U.S. did, their Government will have to get out of Chinese corporations way to spur innovation. Their government will need further reform away from socialism. India is further along on that aspect than China. INDIA is a sleeping giant that will compete with China.
D
Deleted member 21509
Guest
I heard they were trying to get to Detort, but missed it by a long ways.
D
Deleted member 27505
Guest
Not picking on you Derg, just using you as a jumping off point. But your post does kinda seem to infer an assumption that's bugging me. I'm getting real troubled by so many's fetishisation of math and science, and especially of the lumping of science and math with technology and engineering as if there is some seamless continuity between these disparate disciplines. The only seamless continuity always seems to be the pursuit of coin. And as far as technology, that's not even really a discipline. Technology is just the Greek word for "tool" (hammers, and computers and such). Studying technology is like studying avionics; it might you a technician, but not a pilot or a scientist.
I was an Applied Math/ Biology major, so I guess I'm allowed to talk about this. But I also pulled an English Literature major which may be why I do talk about it.
Arts and Humanities and Sciences are simply different sets of tools, not necessarily contradictory, and usually highly complementary. Just as sometimes one needs a screwdriver and sometimes one needs a gas chromatometer, sometimes one needs science and sometimes one needs humanities. And sometimes one needs both (to calibrate a gas chromatometer with a screwdriver, for instance).
Seems to me science in the presence of humans without imagination, ethics, humanity, and intuition is like an oxygen bottle in the presence of a zippo lighter but without a mask.
Must everything, always, without end be assumed to be about making a quick buck by creating gadgets or more potent weapons no one really needs...and using that flawed assumption to justify science education? Science is about a set of tools by which to understand the world and the universe and our place in those realms. Math is the language of that search. Properly understood, science is far more akin to religion and philosophy than it is to engineering and commerce. Gadgets do not glorify or advance science. But often sitting in the woods, beneath a tree does. Science is wonderful, and it needs to be applied wisely. But it's goal is not to create coin. It is to create knowledge and understanding. And the trivium must inform the quadrivium.
We may need more engineers, but they should be renaissance-people before being engineers.
D
Deleted member 27505
Guest
Take pride, sons and daughters! Well, sons anyway...and all you daughters who happened to survive infanticide.
Today is a glorious and propitious day... we wouldn't launch a physics-based space mission on an unpropitious day!
We have mastered copying tires, and wastebaskets, and shirts, and can openers, and computers, and flashlights, and those little squeeky bathtub things...Today, in landing on the moon, we have demonstrated China can copy anything...except a free press and human rights. Well, and the Dalai Lama... we really screwed up trying to copy him.
CoffeeIcePapers
Well-Hung Member
jynxyjoe
Queso King
Que Pasta? You must be replying to the wrong person. You said (like below) that there wasn't any benefit to NASA's continued operation. Specifically when you quoted and refuted @z987k (referencing missions paying $1000 on the dollar) claim about NASA or space exploration's contribution. There are quantifiable gains from the things we chose to tackle, and I would argue the many project we choose not to tackle with even higher rewards
NASA and it's private groups that are contracted by NASA work at the behest of NASA. In your example a home built by a architect (or an entire community for that matter) would not be responsible for the wealth or jobs created because he contracted and they subcontracted. The US government has been pushing its many public groups to use private enterprise contractors. The NSA for example, obviously never spied on anyone, it was really Edward Snowden and his den of hoods who compromised American's privacy (I'm simply taking your argument to the extreme). In a more level headed example, the aircraft you fly are certified through the FAA under DER/DAR's... Those are designated engineering and designated airworthiness reps who are private enterprise (often just one person) who make truckloads of cash which the FAA doesn't see a dime of (well sort of when the Federal Government get's done taxing that rep).
Anyway, the US and world needed NASA to jump-start and foster the space age.
I won't entertain a notion that space exploration and scientific discovery haven't helped the economy. It's wildly mis-informed to say or think so. HOWEVER, I think I may be misunderstanding your point, because you cite references about the shuttle specifically as a mistake (while trying to attribute that example to the entire space program). That doesn't mean you can say all the lab work we've done on the space shuttle or the international space station it helped create are mistakes. I'm willing to concede the shuttle was a mistake, I'm willing to concede that the majority of our Mars landers and probes were a mistake as more than half have turned into ash or wiley coyote-like "poof" into the Martian countryside. A couple mistakes don't outweigh decades of research and continuing enterprises (not to mention the 3:1 return JUST locally to the Florida economy those subcontracting jobs created).
Is government spending wasteful? In some ways yes. A free market will (in a perfect world) push the most economical solution to a problem. However, NASA is, by my own admission, wasteful, and it's return on investment is still 100:1 conservatively and much much higher sometimes. As we continue to under fund the hell out of research missions desired by NASA they will continue to make mistakes and do thing inefficiently (as government is prone to do) but they'll still come out in the positive every time. Space and exploration, the lab tests and new science discovered, will propel this country and this species of Humanity forward at ballistic rates and will be the future. Discovery of electrons didn't create an entire world of electronics for 100 years after (J.J.Thomson if you care), that discovery created uncalculated wealth, but it didn't all go to England (read if you want), it was the rising tide that lifted all ships across a globe. Space will do the same. It does the same today.
Mine one asteroid, and people will put down calculators forever trying to rationalize NASA spending. That will happen in my lifetime. The first prospecting robots (private enterprise) will be heading out in 18months, 3 decades (if not sooner) later you will have raw material deposits floating in "near" earth orbit whose minable wealth will be in the trillions. The first trillionairs will be space entrepreneurs. ... Just real quick I'd like to say to that future generation I welcome our new corporate overloards... Anyway, here's some adult choices we have to make.
1. Government directed research and exploration of space so that even after all our screwups we can get a toehold in space for future generations.
2. Beg real nice when China does it instead, maybe we can have some space on the moon to set up a Taco Cart.
3. Stick head in sand... pray.
------
by the way, if you have books and resources I haven't access to, that bemoan and can walk back every dollar of discovery the space program of all nations have gifted to the human race- I would enjoy a reference or two. I've long since accepted, as fact, NASA and its research's incalculable (somewhat incalculable, I mean we have real dollar numbers everywhere telling you some measure of it's benefits, but I mean the other stuff too) benefit.
I apologize for the grammar @darrenf and @SteveC
Last edited:
