Forum Overview :: Motherfucking News :: Re: X-37

[quote name="Senor Barborito"][quote name="Motherhead"][quote name="laudablepuss"] Also, I'm not super excited about a spaceplane bomber, but I suppose the millitary is usually on the cutting edge of this stuff and then it spills into the civillian world. Of course, since NASA is involved, we can count on it not working for shit.[/quote] It's always amused me that just about major forward technology we take for granted from communications to food additives was conceived during the mercury/gemini/apollo programs but NASA is still the first thing to get axed off of any budget. That might have been explainable when the preponderance of our elected officials were old fucking shrives that never experienced the act of shopping for their own groceries, but it is 2003 and (most of ) the fags in congress and the senate are young enough to know better. Most of them probably made millions in the market off of tech stocks in the early to mid ninties. This makes me wonder if NASA is and perhaps always was NSA owned and operated. "Cry broke, meter the data released to the public, insist projects are cancelled when we no longer want them to hold interest." We spent a (literal) fortune to reach the moon, and then declared it useless and walked away... that is insane and dubious. [/quote] The correct thing to have done in the case of the moon would have been to (and still is) use the moon for mining via macroscopic autonomous Von Neumann (self-reproducing/maintaining) machines. I recall Slashdot running a story roughly 18-24 months back on Carnegie-Mellon have some success with their field tests of Von Neumann robots, and the moon is a perfect environment on which to test them out - plenty of stuff to mine and no people around to kill if something DOES go wrong in a nanoscopic Grey Goo scenario writ large. --SB[/quote]