Engineers in Alabama to build next lunar rocket.
Lets hear it for the guys at Marshall Space Flight Center. The lunar rocket project should soak up a bunch of government money, over many years to come!
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June 8th, 2006
Fine example of corporate welfare among other things. One hopes that some very useful innovations in materials & methods will come of all this work. It'll certainly be a shot in the arm for north Alabama, which can certainly use it. I'm not entirely convinced of the benefits of exploring the moon and the rest of our solar system, let alone the rest of the galaxy & universe. I say this because we've so much left to explore and understand on our own planet, and we have so many issues we might tackle without getting free from earth's gravity. Time will tell. If our species doesn't manage to make itself extinct first, there will eventually come a time when we might want for the elbow room available elsewhere in outer space.
June 8th, 2006
Hmmmm, I’ve never really though of government contracting at NASA to be corporate welfare so much as geographic welfare. While many of the large contracts may be some form of fixed fee, many are on cost plus. I generally view government bases as a nipple out of which the milk of government money flows to selected sites in the country from the rest of the country. So much of NASA contracting is forced to 8A business and small vendors that one can easily see that the government uses the facility as another high dollar social engineering mechanism (much like income tax and the new deal). My Libertarian buddies would call this redistribution of wealth… I would too… ;-)Â
 I do however think space exploration is important. I also think the moon is pretty much spent as a research object, unless someone has an actual plan for how we can gain specific benefit from some sort of operation there (mining or maybe a laser system we could call the “Allen Parsons Project”). Journey to mars, much the same to me. I see little benefit there more than that of idle curiosity (rubbernecking at the beginnings of our solar system, blob cooling, accretion, etc…). I would however like to see real investigation into a propulsion drive that would get us to Mars in months instead of years, now that might be an interesting effort with long term benefits.
 All that said, I believe NASA has given some excellent science to the world, much as military research has. Quite a bit of the government money slated for NASA an the military ends up in higher learning institutions as well. All that said… it is still more fun to bitch about the money that ends up in LockRockMartHeedWell coffers.
June 9th, 2006
I'd say it is definitely specific to geography in this case. I expect the bulk of funds will be spent on personnel working in the area. Redistribution of wealth is an apt description.
I think exploration and the attendant research that precedes and runs along side it are important too. I just hoped to provoke someone else to say as much by being less than enthusiastic about it.
I do think it a pity that, from all appearances at least, our elected office holders no longer seem to have real enthusiasm for the research and exploration NASA is capable of producing. Perhaps they reflect the electorate, as certainly seems to be the case for most other matters of public interest.