The space shuttle: The Folly of Our Age

At 11:34 AM +0530 7/30/07, sraj wrote:
>This article while taking a potshot at the space shuttle, also questions the
>necessity of humans becoming space faring.

Whether or not Derbyshire got a little too much stodge in his breakfast
Wheaties that morning, he has a point. The Space Shuttle is, in fact, the
very model of a modern government boondoggle.

My personal opinion is that people should go to space for, for lack of a
better word, *sport*. If you call doing something dangerous for the slight
prospect of enormous wealth a sport, that is. Gambling can be considered
sport, I suppose, and gambling with one's life certainly qualifies.

Even more outrageously, :-), I think that government shouldn't even
"sponsor" science, except directly in the case of engineering and applied
science for defense (what part of the words "force monopoly" does one not
understand?).

It certainly shouldn't sponsor sports, like who touches what flying rock
first, any more than it should subsidize stadia in the bombed-out shell of
its now-legislated-to-death inner cities.

Which is, again, why I like asteroids. :-).

Of course, the modern nation state has developed such an extreme capability
to confiscate wealth at tax time that Caligula's bread and circuses don't
even begin to approach the, yes, boondoggles, even enlightened
bandit-princes like Uncle Sam can pay for with *your* stolen money.

Cheers,
RAH

--
R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'