Apollo 8 assembly, NASA is incredible

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Apollo 8 assembly

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Oh I thought you meant a model set you'd gotten from Santa

I was able to go behind the scenes of NASA between 2003-2005 and it is unbelievable.
A kid in a candy store best describes what I saw, (had no clue what most of the stuff I was seeing was) but it was amazing and unbelievably clean. Everything I looked at was as if it had never been used and served no other purpose on earth than to look beautiful at that certain moment in time. I was awe struck!

Also security was extremely tight. They had colored (red, blue, yellow, green, white) painted on the ground and you only had permission to go places where your assigned Line color went. They definitely had there shite together!

Thanks Obama...!

(no message)

It's amazing how smart those people were way back then.....

Well one of the posters already stated how clean everything was....

A few thoughts -

The Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo manned spacecraft were all developed in the 60s

The Shuttle was developed in the 70s

It has been 40 years since NASA developed a manned spacecraft - that is unacceptable for an Agency that is supposed to be research and development.

Without getting too controversial, in the 50s, 60s, and most of 70s, NASA's workforce was primarily the best and the brightest - the US had a goal to get men to the moon and back before the USSR. Remember JFK's challenge?

But over time NASA became just another FedGov Agency, bowing to the social engineering quotas until the point where they have been just another FedGov jobs program. NASA doesn't need 10 Centers plus several other sites - those are primarily political pork - and while I agree that the F-35 has been too expensive, the money spent on it wouldn't have been diverted to NASA - it would have likely gone to more social programs. NASA's budget isn't real healthy but much of it is wasted in duplicative programs, sites, Centers, etc. After Shuttle, 6k+ contractors were laid off at KSC - no NASA civil servants were laid off and they still are on the payroll, showing up everyday with no real mission - that's where huge $$ could be harvested. Commercial space is the future, and I support that, but I hope that Trump rolls NASA into the DoD and they define a real deep space mission - that is their charter.

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What could we have done that we can't still do?

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Well we probably would have already orbited Mars. Considering the rocket NASA is currently developing has many similarities to the Saturn V, I've struggled not thinking we are rediscovering rocket skills that were lost in the 70s w the Space Shuttle and 30yrs of congressional budget cuts.

That's some serious Muslim outreach right there, baw.