Really?

In what way was “Apollo a huge success for private and commercial as well as new tech…”

Because any sane assessment of the program was that it was a disaster in that regard.

Well it pools in near-surfaces fractures generally on the earth, right? And many fractures are caused by earthquakes or plate tectonics generally rather than impacts?

But perhaps this means we could get useful data for impact science from the oil companies, who do quite detailed studies of such fractures.

“Inaccurate”

What? You’ve already admitted that you want “government funded space projects of scale“, and you are on record chastising people that want government funding, since “the federal government IS borrowing 43 cents of every dollar it spends.”

These are your words, found in the posts above, and they clearly show you being hypocritical.

Which makes it seem, again in your words, “you’re just crankin’ to crank.”

You are the one that is inaccurate.

Impact is a geological process on Earth as it is on Mars.

But here on Earth plate tectonics and weathering destroy data which we can recover from Mars.

Speaking about private versus public science, oil pools in the fractures of impacts. Care to speculate on how that affects impact studies?

If we’re going to determine what AGW hazard there is, solar variability and its effects are going to have to be very well understood first.

This should also benefit food production, as with over 7 billion people living on Earth, ensuring their food supply is not a trivial task.

Inaccurate. As usual.

Right now relations with China and Russia are not at their best and may get a lot worse with the current situation in the Middle East, so this is not about the ISS.

Apollo was a huge success for private and commercial as well as new tech, so it was not an “odd” comment for developing a Lunar base.

We have wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on the Constellation program, exploring shareholder investment accounts, if you want to tag that as human exploration. Anyway, that’s old news.

“I think one day we may have complete international cooperation, but right now things are a little volatile.”

Volatile? We’ve had an international space station in orbit for over 11 years. What’s “volatile” about that?

“I know it won’t be easy, but Congress needs to be convinced that its time to take the next step for human exploration.”

They already support human exploration, but they also don’t want to increase NASA’s budget. You can only put so much human space activity within a $18B/year budget, and we’re pretty close to being there.

As to Congress, without some sort of recognized “National Imperative”, no Congress is going to provide funding for any big projects in space beyond the scope of NASA’s current budget. Absent the aberration called Constellation, this 40 year trend should be pretty easy to recognize.

“I believe this time around we will see a good return on this investment.”

What an odd comment.

The Apollo program was a huge success, but it’s goals were political – science was secondary.

So you seem to be saying that the U.S. Government will somehow profit by funding a modest polar moon base? How is that supposed to work?

How does the U.S. Taxpayer get paid back their investment? With lunar water? Land rights? Mining shares?

Congress will only make such a huge investment if it supports a strategic goal for the U.S., and that so far has been the mirage that many have chased but none have found.

In the US the VP will become President if the President is impeached, dies, or resigns therefore people kind of like having a competent one and the choice of it makes a big impact as to if the candidate will win the election or not.

It should also be noted that the Vice-President traditionally is the nominal head of the space program (established by JFK in 1961 to give LBJ something to do).

That said, it was a terrible putdown by Wolf Blitzer. More evidence of the Inside-the-Beltway mentality.

I’ll add that another problem with NASA Science and NASA generally is that they lack sufficient discipline to stay on budget and schedule for their projects. Even MER significantly exceeded the original budget although they did manage to stay on schedule – but only just when you read the book about it by the PI on the mission Steve Squyres. MER was also notable in that they built and flew 2 not just the 1. When you take that into account, they did pretty well but it’s about the last mission that has managed to achieve that result. All the others have failed if you consider budget and schedule key project deliverables.

Science is more than just imagery. In fact they even considered not putting a Camera on Pioneer 10/11! Probes carry more than just a camera.

In the case of Sojourner, that was more an engineering mission than a science one. It was thought that a rover would not last long on Mars but could be helpful in extending the reach of instruments since a rover could travel further than an arm. Instead they found out that the lander limited the range of the rover. Sojourner was still working, but Pathfinder( the lander) died first. In terms of science it objective was to study a wide varity of rocks that were moved to the landing location via a supposed flood. It also studied weather directly. There were also questions about plate tectonics and how it works on Mars. Sojourner found rocks that had been remelted by volcanic activity.

MER’s science object was to determine if liquid water ever existed on Mars and perhaps how long. MER lacks metorlogy instramets. Mars gives very contradictory information about that as it has features that suggest water flowed, but lacked certain minerals generated in water. In the case of Sprit what was thought to be a dry lake turned out to be volcanic (Sprit did discover evidence of hot springs….). In the case of Oppy it landed where a mineral that usually (but not always) forms in water was detected from Orbit. In Oppy’s case it found evidence of water (a shallow sea or a flood plain). In both cases they found places where life on earth would have done well in the past.