OT: 10 smartest countries in the world when it comes to science

Better yet, no shuttles.

And NASA is supposed to do aeronautics, too. ISS gobbles up too much of the budget.

ISS is more entertainment than science. Crickets in Space. I keep thinking of all those kids who had TVs in their classroom to see Challenger, with teacher Christa McAuliffe aboard, launch and disintegrate. She was just there for PR.

Judy Resnik was another awesome person killed by the Shuttle.

One would have been ok as an experimental vehicle. It's not a lot of money in the federal budget.

They didn't show that live in the classroom because all the networks stopped broadcasting launches before 1986. CBS discontinued coverage first, years earlier.

Oh stop it. You're sensible.

Right. They did great things but it never paid off for the companies that paid for it.

Those labs were successful because they got a budget and the scientists decided what to spend it on. The problem with NASA is that congress wants to decide what projects get funded. That way they can steer spending toward their home states. If it was up to scientists they never would have put so much of their budget into the shuttle and the ISS.

Only over a few feet; reliability, comms reliability and latency are sticking points.

Of course, but the experiments aren't that delicate and time-critical.

John is here to attemp to justify stupidity, and his daughter is here to tell him he is doing a good job at it. Both are useless.

Imagine the real, useful stuff that could have been done if say a pig or a rat breathed their oxygen instead of them getting to.

See how that works, asshole?

You're an idiot.

The JWST is what is next and the shuttle program answered questions they needed answered to build it.

So f*ck you and all your ill informed, never was informed, and too stupid to have gotten it anyway horseshit.

The Columbia Space Shuttle launch and explosion absolutely was carried on live television.

err Challenger... that is.

Columbia was also aired.

We stopped work and turned it on as well.

Then they made an exception because the teacher was on board. I came home that day and saw it on TV but I thought they started broadcasting only after the accident, because the previous few launches were not covered live.

I'm with you, expensive and boring.

We should be sending robots everywhere! I want robot's to dive into whatever Saturn (Jupiter?) moon it is that has ice with oceans underneath.

George H.

Hah, grin, I am who I vote. I really liked Obama to begin with, I sent him money. I think he and J. Boehner, could have done the 'grand bargain', except for everyone else involved. :^(

I'm all for scraping NASA, or at least a clean sweep. E. Musk can launch stuff out past Mars. What's that cost?

George H. I got a little cranky about the labs, sorry. There's lots of places doing research.

FAKE NEWS

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ell.

There's be no reason to put more people on the moon again until we've done it for long enough to have had a thorough look around. then they'll find so mething useful, and guys like you will then claim that it was always obviou s that we could make money by exploiting whatever it turns out to be.

Mars is different again, and bigger than the moon. Saying that we won't fin d anything there so we won't go looking is rather dumb.

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s well.

How would John Larkin know? His grasp of science is evidenced by his uncrit ical acceptance of denialist propaganda - he seems to think that a low numb er of sunspots can bring on an ice age, even through there's no eleven year s cycle in the climate that matches the 11-year sunspot cycle.

John Larkin's imagination isn't up to much.

They did stop covering it a few launches earlier. Then they might have gone back to coverage because a teacher was on board.

Of course I mean that you're relatively sensible for a Democrat.

Yeah but not like Bell Labs (7 Nobel Prizes) or PARC. IBM's lab was noted for failing to create the specific technologies that production needed. I guess that explains how they changed their approach and started to produce more profitable but less groundbreaking discoveries.