The space shuttle: The Folly of Our Age

On 7/30/07, R.A. Hettinga wrote:
(...)
> 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?).
(...)

Hettinga,

I don't think at all that you are being outrageous. It's much like my
own point of view. For the reasons above, I think that nowadays space
tourism (the "sport" of going to space) is by far the best "seed" for
people finally getting off-Earth in the long term...