“This is so 20th century.” That’s space-geek and former NASA cheerleader Bill Whittle’s reaction to the liftoff (finally) of the NASA Space Launch System Artemis mission, on an unmanned journey to lap the Moon and return. Should government just step aside and let Elon Musk and the private space enterprises do what NASA can’t?
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9 replies on “Go Artemis! (Be Gone!): NASA Space Launch System Victory Costs More than It’s Worth”
NASA probably suffers from what seems a common government ailment: budgetary and regulatory capture. There’s too effing much money, and too effing many regulations, and the regulators are complacent in their power. And things go to a bad place.
Do again what we did 50 years ago. Better still, do what we did 100 years ago: move people using trains! God, we are smart!
North Korea does a better rocket launch show that NASA.
https://youtu.be/KzMkzHpunEs
And yes Kim got a go-pro on his rocket and had it launch past and airborne drone with a good camera. He has been paying attention to how Elon does it.
In some shots you see the daughter. She looks to be 12 -14. There were concerns that one of his children was sick needing surgery. This is probably showing that she it OK. It also shows that the kids are not hostage to the foreign minister, Kim Yong Nam, as they were before 2018.
Kim’s rocket launches are a breach of a UN ban but the US under Trump is not a signatory. Biden has not signed either. It would ban some US testing.
Kim is still in full compliance with the Singapore/ Panmunjom treaty. No one reads treaties. Some in South Korea are now blocking reunification. The process was always going to take a decade anyway.
The Hanoi talks were staged to help with Kim’s national election he had to show that the treaty with Trump was not surrender. Standing Trump up and walking away won a parliamentary majority. The north Korean parliament is bogus but then the same can now be said for the USA.
A new generation of people that are more nationalist than communist must be created. Spot the subtle shift to US style uniforms for the missile crew, not earlier Russian styles. Free market allowed at the local level. Internal capital traditions. Kim has sent hardliners to China and Russia and Donets to experience communist hospitality at it worst. In the Ukraine they are not fighting but are getting all the worst jobs; bomb disposal, burying the dead, de mining. There are no reports of casualties yet. Kim Jong Un can’t kill the hardliners in order to transition away from communism. He gives them train tickets to the socialist utopias.
There is talk of a renewed nuclear program from some. That talk is needed to keep Russia and China at bay. However there is no proof of a weapons program.
I believe Kim is Maga and a Trump fan, even a good friend. He does not trust Biden. He was not the Dictator before 2018 just a puppet. Jang Song-thaek was running the show from 2009 to 2013. Kim Yong Nam from 2013 to 2018. The south Korean leaders probably know all this.
NASA died with Affirmative Action. They stopped hiring the best and brightest engineers and scientists in the name of “diversity”. Heck, NASA put men on the moon with sliderules. After adopting Affirmative Action, they couldn’t keep the Space Shuttle in space using supercomputers.
I need to interpret for younger viewers. Bill’s lack of enthusiasm for the Artemis project is most likely based in the underlying fact the no one who was born after the 1930s has walked on the moon. And they did it with primitive computers and knowing that any and everything that could go wrong would result in death.
You point out that we didn’t get anything tangible from walking on the moon, but leave out the advances in science that resulted from the pursuit.
Now the money invested by NASA is focused on social issues of inclusion and equity.
The bastards stole our pioneer’s vision and ruined it.
Keith, I feel that way about everything American excellence promised me when I was 11, when I first became aware of how uniquely blessed we are to live here. That was more than 60 years ago, when NASA, and American ingenuity, were truly, remarkably, astonishing.
I think you can trace the turning point to our baby-boomer “great ideas” of the 1960s. Creating Social Security took grandma out of the house and gave her to the government. The Great Society bill rewarded single mothers with government monies and kicked the father out of the child’s life. Best of intentions ……
Do you think we’ll fix it? Will we bring grandma and dad back? I worry we’ve gone too long without them…
Social Security basically promising that taxing your great grandchildren will pay for your retirement is probably a done deal, as there is no inertia towards moving grandma back into the house. The hopeful thing is that the poor should gravitate back towards family and away from government servitude. They’re not stupid enough to keep this up if they are plausibly shown a better way out than monetizing victimhood. Then again, that depends on the Left keeping up their plunge into radical crazy and the Right maintaining common sense.