Originally posted by Aramis:
[QB] Sarcasm, Mal. Sarcasm.
Bill (and often I) are filled with it. We use it for humor. It carries poorly on paper (or other textual media).
Bill tends to exaggerate his dislikes for humorous intent (or, more correctly, apparently for same). I do, too.
I can tell sarcasm apart from malice. And in Bill's case, when he gets on his high horse he's all about the sheer spite and malice, not sarcasm.
Hell, he practically wished me dead for approving of bioroids in Transhuman Space, because the concept offended him so. And this is something in a freakin'
game.
As for NASA commiting an unspeakable Violation, well the promised lunar colony is STILL not there, Pan-Am is a shade of it's former self, and NASA can't keep the fleet flying, rejected Both the serious contenders claiming the shuttle was good enough, and fills it's papers with unreadable jargon, despite knowing that educators are the most common readers, and typically are of average to subaverage IQ's based upon studies.
Yes, and none of that affects anyone personally. Unless they had their entire future staked on the fact that they'd be living on the moon by the year 2000, or were one of the people laid off when the X-(34?) was cancelled.
It's fine to be annoyed at that - I sure as heck am. I thought Sean O'Keefe and Dan Goldin - the former NASA administrators - made a lot of stupid, incomprehensible decisions. NASA is just blundering around in the dark today.
NASA is lofty in it's mission, but has failed on promise after promise; it's losing street cred. NASA at one point said we'd be colonizing the moon within the next five years... we can't even send a man there now! (Actually, we could, by sending a few of russian energia launchers up... one with the orbiter, one with the lander, one with a landable base, and a Soyuz up to send the crew up. The assembled craft could use some chem with a few ion arrays to shorten travel times...
It's funny how every scifi/space fan thinks they can do a better job
. There's a lot of bureaucracy and politics in all this. It shouldn't be there, but it is. That's what's messing things up. That and a lack of focus and money and resources.
Plus, it's hard to send people to Mars and the Moon when it requires billions to be spent on research and engineering over several decades, and successive US governments come along and 'rethink' it all every four years and scrap this and that and change priorities. Bush's insane Moon/Mars program won't last for the same reasons - it's very badly thought out, it makes a lot of rather optimistic assumptions, is shafting most of the astrononomical community by shifting the focus to manned flight when perfectly good unmanned missions (like Hubble) are being screwed over, and frankly most of the astronomical community doesn't actually see the point of it either.
NASA is, in short, dedicated to keeping NASA in the business of being NASA, as opposed to actually exploring space by human means, which was why they were formed: too put men into space to learn about earth.
Funny, I thought they were formed to try to beat the Russians into space
.
more than 10 astronauts are dead because of complacency in NASA at some level, rather than ignorance, ala Apollo 1. A spaceprobe was lost because someone forgot to label units on a program's interface. (both shuttle losses were foreseeable incidents that administrators decided were too small a threat to fix. Or, for that matter, to check for.)
Oh, Apollo 1 was complacency and idiocy too. Yes, these cases were avoidable and caused by bureaucratic dithering, but don't be under the illusion that space travel is or ever will be 'safe'. It's always going to be a risk.
