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Originally Posted by August
I disagree that the moon landings will someday be considered a failure. Our species went from the dawn of flight to the moon in just 67 years. That is success by any reasonable yardstick.
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I agree that from a technical perspective the moon landings were an incredibile acomplishment. One of the milestones of the twentieth century.
But look at the big picture, the manned space program. It was a failure to capitalize on that success. We are back to square one. As you note 40 years ago people were walking on the moon (albeight at great cost and for less than a week between missions). Nowadays the most we can do is go 300 km up in the soon to be decomissioned Shuttle. How's that for full filling the promise of human colonization in space ?
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However I do think it's time to turn space over to private and commercial interests. We need reasons to go into space beyond just for the advancement of scientific knowledge or backing up human populations.
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No, its time to make human colonization of space a long term program.
You need visionary people for this and of course long term political support.
Spending lets say 500* billion dollars to make a space station over 15 years and once complete let it rot is not the way to make headway into human space exploration. Private industry or no private industry.
You need continual economical support, and a clear long term vision of what infrastructure will be needed. Right now we are walking in the dark. The Space Shuttle was not needed. It was a failure from day one.
Spending big bucks here and there without a clear idea of what one wants to accomplish leads to NASA. This has been the manned space program, a walk in the dark, day by day. It has printed FAILURE all over.
Now real scientific exploration with space probes etc.... is another can of worms.
And one were all things considered NASA is doing pretty well.
But thats not the argument is it ?
* I don't know what the real cost of the ISS is.