Friday 23 October 2009

The tragedy of NASA


And so the long awaited Augustine Commission report has been released, offering its vision for NASA's future.

And what did it recommend?

Eight piss-weak alternatives to keep NASA on a shoestring - two maintaining the current funding and six with a paltry $3 billion p.a. top-up.

To achieve what?

Bugger all really. Skip the moon. Forget landing on Mars in the next thirty years. Go visit an asteroid! Do a Mars flyby! Or go check out Phobos or Deimos and do some 'exciting science' there.

By when?

Oh, going back to the moon should be a goer by 2030...

Jazus H. Fucking Rice Crispies!

In the 1960s NASA got the moon and back in less than ten years from a standing start, and now a bunch of learned bean counters say it can't be done again in under twenty!

NASA has achieved some of the greatest events in all of human history. Getting off the Earth CAN be achieved. And getting off the third rock from the sun is both inevitable and a total human necessity.

The U.S. has the financial muscle to do this. The money exists.

The elephant in the room is - of course - the U.S. military. The U.S. Department of Defense gets more money each year than NASA has been granted in its full history of 50 years - over $500 billion. Every year.

To do what?

Stuff all! Piss off middle eastern countries and rattle the sacred sabers. A colossal fucking waste of money and resources with few tangible gains.

Just 5% of the Defence budget moved to NASA would put a permanent human presence on both the moon and Mars in just a few years, doing real science and expanding human boundaries in amazing ways. Our first steps to the stars.

Or, the preferred option of gun luvin' American paranoids, keep the status quo and keep on spending trillions of dollars, beating the crap out of carefully nurtured enemies.

Carl Sagan was right. A great civilization itching to snuff itself out of existence when on the verge breaking free.

Sigh.

Friday 16 October 2009

Suit Blight

There are times when I would like to scrape together all the world-media-owning suits (Rupert Murdoch and similar pond scum), all the copyright lawyers, all the net ignorant politicians and all the other olde worlde corporate executives and related douchebags together in front of a very large stone wall and blast the living crap out of the lot of them with a few hundred thousand bazookas.

Oh how we'd cheer.


Bugger!

The Internet is GLOBAL. Get over it!

There is no excuse for this sort of endless copyright bullshit being drooled out by stuffwits still working to a 19th Century business model.

The above example is not very important in the scheme of things, but note that it is for a smegging 21 second promo! A mighty media empire will crumble and fall if a non-US citizen should be allowed to glimpse it! No money to be made here!

AaaaAAARGH!!!!

Sigh.

Morons.

Damn. I've run out of exclamation points.



Warm up the bazookas...