A meaningful goal for NASA
 

If NASA is going to exist, what would you have it do?

I'd like to see a permanent human settlement on the moon. If NASA could start such a settlement, I suspect the foothold would eventually become valuable real estate if they were open to renting to all comers and didn't put roadblocks in the way of development. What do you want NASA to do or not do?

I would found the autonomous land of Griffbeeria and raise the first lunar hops.

I think it'd be cool if they could get up near the computer industry, or at least Apple: bi-annual announcements of frequently elite breakthroughs/new versions of things/whatever.

As long as I can remember (not long), there hasn't been much NASA-public interaction; they're just kinda there, and every once in a while they send off rockets.

I'm for pretty much any nifty thing they come up with, really. I suppose some sort of "go live on the moon" thing'd be nice. We haven't really spent much time there lately, anyway.

So, yeah. If they come up with a new earth->space->earth ship, and go revisit the moon with it, they'd be rockin'.

China might give us someone to compete with.

Sno-cones for Peace
 

Sno-cones at the South Pole Aitken basin. Water. Silicon. Aluminum. Raw materials all set and ready to produce solar panels and rocket fuels. Silicon for glass and silicone for habitat domes. Aluminum for power cables, silicone to insulate them. A furnace on the moon consists of a big concave mirror concentrating the sun's rays into a ceramic vessel. A low escape velocty from the moon. Just set up linear accelerators, and shoot stuff into trans-earth orbits. Heck, keep it on the moon, reinvest and build. Cool. I'm there.

Re: A meaningful goal for NASA
 

I want it to be my personal job trough, much like I will make the mayor's office of Philadelphia if elected in November.

Uryoces and Syc both have good strong hard headed purposes for NASA. Unfortunately, only one of you can get your way. Smart money is with Syc especially if he moves to a Bush state.

I'm not a fan of Florida...Texas though...ah, I dunno. I wouldn't mind it, but the lady might have some issues with that.

I hate to say it... no, I really hate to say it... we're talking about somebody who not only grew up with Star Wars and Star Trek (when he could catch a TV station broadcasting it in the semi-rural burg he grew up in) but could also explain the difference between the spacecraft used for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo and could describe in numbing detail every phase of the Apollo flights to the moon at the age of 8.

And what I hate to say is that it may be time to bag manned space flight. I'm still processing this one, big time... and I'm of the proper age that my formative "where were you" memory was "where were you when you head about the Challenger explosion", so of course like everybody else who has strong memories of that, this is deja vu all over again... (and damn I wish Richard Feynman were still with us) so I may change my mind... but even before this, I was starting to wonder if the effort to put human beings up there is worth it.

If you asked me to name the glorious achievements of our civilization in space, I'd have to say: Apollo. Pioneer. Voyager. Dammit, I used TRS-80 Model III computers in junior high that probably had more juice than Voyager. Viking. Galileo. Hubble. Pathfinder. And unless something goes wrong, Cassini is going to kick some butt in a couple years.

Needless to say, the common denominator is that none of these were manned EXCEPT Apollo. (And yes, Hubble was essentially useless as delivered, and a shuttle mission fixed it, and then another one upgraded it beyond original specs. And then adaptive optics brought into question whether it was worthwhile to have an orbiting telescope.)

So what happened with Apollo? My answer would be that it happened at a time when it was politically feasible to throw the money that was needed on the problem. Most of you probably know that we sent men to the moon and back several times, 30 years ago... and that even though we did it 30 years ago, we couldn't do it again tomorrow if we wanted to since we stopped (again for political reasons) developing the technology. I guess what I'm saying is, do it right or don't do it, and I can't see that there's any hope of it being done right in the near future, so we might as well stick with robotic exploration craft.

Either way I'm all for mothballing the shuttles. If you really want to expend capital (monetary and other wise) sending people up, then go back to the drawing board and design something new but informed by everything we've learned in the last 20 years. The basic shuttle design dates from the late 70s or so, and the last one (Endeavour) was built over 10 yrs ago in the wake of Challenger. If we haven't gotten our money's worth out of them by now, we never will.

With spare parts, mind you.

How about true renewable power sources via space. i'm mean there is plenty of energy out there, how about finding some good way to harness them? What i say true i mean a power source that generates more power in it's lifetime that it costs to create.

Macintosh computers suck and so does the Apple corporation. They have nothing to say about advanced technology since they don't have any.

I'd like to see NASA privately funded through R&D for various companies, or other interested parties. Whether or not that included tourism is up in the air. I'd like to see us travel to mars in the next 20 years using the new shuttle with the new propulsion system designed a few years ago.

NASA could be profitable if they did missions to orbit sattelites or to fix ones already in orbit and through doing the R&D mentioned previously. With their profits I'd like to see advances in medicine, etc.

I don't think we can gain much by colonizing the moon. I don't know anyone who would choose to live there if we did. But if we could use minerals or things like that to improve life on earth, I'd be all for it. Eventually (long after I'm dead) it would be cool if we could travel to another solar system and return.

I'm just curious what you would call Quartz Extreme then. Or Rendezvous.

dave, youre wrong! when will everyone realize that if radar says it, its immutable truth! i was thinking about buying a powerbook actually. until radar said that apple sucks. now im back on the windows bandwagon. because as radar says, theyre the best.

~james

or airport extreme, or the incredible powerbook design or......