Nonsense. Energia would love to make and fly more Soyuz capsules if private tourists were willing to pay the costs of doing so instead of the marginal costs of marginal costs for unfilled seats. And it can add Soyuz flights for substantially less cost than any spacecraft resulting from the NASA HSF bureaucracy is likely to cost, whether it’s done with a fixed-price contract and called “commercial” or not. Even if the market were untested it’s the people who want to base national policy on hypothetical markets that have the burden of proof, not the people who question these economic fantasies.

You’re kidding, right? Peura is able to quote the number of minutes and seconds U.S. astronauts had spent in space at the time President Kennedy set the lunar landing goal. I’d like to see anyone else on this forum (myself included) pull those kinds of facts.”

You have got to be kidding?! Your defense of her knowledge is the fact that she knew how long Shepard’s Freedom 7 flight was?!
It’s in Wikipedia for crying out loud and I bet that’s where she got it.

I expected a better rebuttal from you Tom.

I love my country and do believe we have did a lot of great things and get a lot of things right, but we also do things on the other end of the spectrum and shouldnt be afraid to talk about them.

Seems to me you shouldn’t have to defend your patriotism in the first place.

I can’t recall seeing a single bumper sticker that reads, “CANADA — LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!”

For some reason, there are those who think you have to prove your loyalty to your country.

So far as I’m concerned, it’s nobody’s business but my own.

I think these people are incredibly insecure about themselves and somehow afraid that a differing opinion might expose an inadequacy in themselves. This nation was founded on the right to dissent and disagree. You really have to wonder why these people are so afraid of a different opinion than their own.

I find at times though, when people are shouting from the rooftops to the rest of the planet about american execptionalism they take it out of THAT context and somehow apply it to mean that whatever decsion is made by the US by defintion is exceptional. If a person is going to use it out of context then we should BE exceptional in more things than we truely are.

I feel that so many people choose to live in fear, I don’t.

To many are afraid to not only admit we have some warts but that we ever had any to begin with.

I am not afraid to admit our past and talk about it, I am not afraid to admit I am ashamed of aspects of our past and talk about them.

I am not afraid to look at the unvarnished truths that stare us in the face and talk about them and how to move foreward. I am not afraid to admit that America doesn’t do everything perfect and we are not always exceptional.

Who said You can always count on America to do the right thing, after they have tried everything else.

I love my country and do believe we have did a lot of great things and get a lot of things right, but we also do things on the other end of the spectrum and shouldnt be afraid to talk about them.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/04/13/specter.denying.science/index.html?hpt=C1

Most times your arguements make sense, but this doesn’t as it is untested.

It is like saying 99 percent of fighter jets are owned by the government when only the government is allowed to have them. When has NASA proved your theory and not only embraced open commercial options for human space flight and used them.

If NASA auctioned off half the seats on the shuttle to the private sector and no one even placed a bid THEN your arguement would hold true. To say what the outcome of what it would be before it has ever even been tried is a false arguement. You say it is only government and a minuscule fraction, that fraction is all that is ALLOWED BY those governments to fly. Russia has over 300 people who have wanted to fly and had the money to do it. they were only ALLOWED to fly that fraction. And NASA fought it just like they fought the idea of MIR being turned into a commercial station that would compete with them.

The fact that someone has been willing to part with that much money to fly into space not once but twice tells me something about that market.

In the old soviet union, when they didnt have a very good domestic car production and consumer demand out paced it, they simply required you to have 800 hours of behind the wheel training before you could get a license. Problem solved. It is the same now, pack on almost a year of training to go into space there by lowering the demand and the number of people willing to commit that much time to it. People have paid advanced fares to Virgin galatic for a suborbital ride that will take YEARS to fullfill. That is pent up demand. If their was an actual commercial orbit vehicle that NASA was fully on board with do you honestly believe there is not going to be a waiting list just like Russia has today?

I’m really starting to tire of this drama queen attitude among certain current and former KSC employees. You’re an employee, not the center of the universe. This is the way the rest of the world lives. You’re not exempt from reality.

The next whining you’ll hear will be when Obama doesn’t personally kiss the butt of each and every employee at KSC on Thursday. I read recently that the last President to address KSC employees directly was Reagan, probably right after the Shuttle program went operational. They need to stop drinking their own Kool-Aid.