re: NASA awards space contracts to SpaceX and Boeing. Manned Deep Space Missions

Elon just needs to do it COMPLETELY on his own.

NASA is constantly doing this shite. We're going to Mars! Then it's, no, not Mars, back to the Moon. Then it's no, not the Moon, an asteroid! Now it's no, not an asteroid, a new Mercury capsule, which is something we already did in the '60s!

I don't expect them to do anything other than generate more global warming research.

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We have our shite so together here clearly it's time to spend money on going somewhere else. Why should Mars not be as screwed up as earth?

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This is a ridiculously stupid argument. Do you really think a time will come when we've solved every single major problem? News flash, but it never has and never will happen in human history.

Where our space program is is simply fricking embarrassing. We're now hitching rides with the Russians into space. Do you have any idea how many people would shite a brick if I told them this was the future back in 1969? Shortly after Armstrong uttered his iconic words, America would throw up the white flags and welcome Mother Russia to our shores.

We are already almost literally 40 years behind schedule as far as where our space program should be, and this news is the first ray of hope in over a decade. And if we don't fund NASA, then when we've nearly destroyed ourselves and wasted most of our raw materials, it will be far too late. We need to start planning mankind's future into the centuries now. Instead idiots are too blind to see anything beyond 4 fricking years, and we're mortgaging the future of not only our country but our species to money launderers and borderline (usually) evil politicians who have no intentions of uniting us at a species, but merely in destroying ourselves to where they can comfortably relax on the corpses of millions. Mankind was born on Earth, but it was never meant to die here.

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We went from the moon to taking a step back to trying to build a reusable orbital vehicle, to punting on that and developing the abortion that is the shuttle, to now taking another step back to building a modern Mercury capsule.

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You realize the the designs of these shuttles designed to completely escape Earth's orbit have to more or less designed almost the same, right? Plus the capsules are a hell of a lot safer than the shuttles of the past few decades. If something fricks up on the orbiters, then they're all pretty fricked. A capsule though has multiple chambers that can come off as needed, which was how the crew members of Apollo 13 survived.

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I'm gonna disagree

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That's a pretty sad thought for us as a species then. What can I say, I'm an optimist.

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We should be independent of Russia by 2017

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Need to add this to the OP, will later, Space Race 2.0 is legit people.

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Need to add this to the OP, will later, Space Race 2.0 is legit people.

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As big of an optimist as I am about our space program, I wouldn't go that far. It would take Russia or China landing on the Moon for it to be a legitamate Space Race again, this time the destination being Mars. I don't see any concrete plans on this, just empty promises. NASA promised back in the 70s and 80s that they'd have someone on Mars by 1996, but 2 decades later, we're no closer to this reality than we were in 1976. It's unbelievably sad that no one gives a flying frick about NASA anymore, since it is the one program in the US that needs drastic more funding.

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If we could just take some of the wasted money and give it to NASA we would have all kinds of cool shite.

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Why do that when we can pay for all the turkey legs and donuts welfare users can eat.