Robber Barons in Space

On Monday, March 17, 2003, at 04:29 PM, jdr7181 wrote:

> Why don't we have better transportation to orbit?

For an excellent discussion of this point, see
http://www.ghg.net/redflame/launch.htm. To tell the truth, I don't
agree with his conclusion, but the discussion is absolutely first class.

The dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid because they weren't
space-faring. It's almost as if Gaia then thought "Well, dinosaurs
worked pretty well, but space-faring is necessary. Maybe I'll should
try mammals this time." Humanity is now developing systems to detect
and deflect asteroids, and could build orbital space colonies to spread
beyond Earth to insure life would survive a planetary catastrophe.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.