Re: some here will find this amusing

quoth Rob Kaper:

| I would still prefer that private investors would go to space and not
| governments, though. Governments should govern, no more.

all else being equal, i agree. unfortunately, this kind of basic 
research is not the kind of thing that draws investment, even less so 
after the pie-in-the-sky dotcom boom/bust. the reason is that all that 
can be promised is "we're going to try to go to space and will in the 
process discover some stuff that will make lots of money; we don't know 
when this will be or what it will be."

unfortunately -- and i blame this on the media as much as i blame it on 
people in general -- our way of looking at things has gotten terribly 
skewed. the "winner" of the latest "reality show" is now considered 
"news." the winner of state lotteries -- an oppressive tax on the poor 
and stupid -- is considered "news." in the last year there has been ten 
times as much coverage of laci peterson, kobe bryant, and michael 
jackson as there has been of all public policy issues combined.

our national memory has shrunk to about 15 minutes. financially, we 
think as far as the next quarter -- the very brave may carry it to the 
end of the current fiscal year. in public policy, we think to the next 
election.

but events do not fit into the variation of a half-hour sitcom that we 
have assigned to them.

| On the other hand, within moments of the official announcement,
| Russia and China announced plans to visit the moon as well. Which
| might turn it into a space race.

china has been at work on this, slowly and steadily, for some time. and 
china has a tradition of looking ahead 50, 100 *years.* so if the space 
program, which is very modest by budgetary standards even if it costs 
the highest amounts people have pulled out of the air, manages to break 
our short-sightedness, even a little, it will have been well worth it. 
because today we couldn't even gather together the support necessary to 
build the interstate highway system.
-- 
dep

It's remarkable how quickly a problem goes away once the people with
a vested interest in there being a problem go away. -- Mark Steyn

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