“Having hopelessly lost the argument about the alleged inevitability of the future funding of HSF…”

There you go again.

Congress is currently funding HSF, and has been funding it for over 40 years, so it’s not “alleged inevitability”. And since no one of any power in Congress is talking about zeroing out that funding, it will continue to be funded.

I know it hurts your feelings when reality tramples your “theories”, but that’s not my concern.

Having hopelessly lost the argument about the alleged inevitability of the future funding of HSF, you now hallucinate that I said something completely different from what I actually said. A typical cult reaction to reality.

goo goo gah gah

here was the question:

“Human spaceflight .. what is the best way forward with the funding available.”

We can argue till the cows come home about where money COULD be going. That has absolutely nothing to do with the question.

Money IS going to be spent on something, like it or not. It is going to be spent on human spaceflight, so what is the best bang for the buck, with money that is going to be spent anyway, doesn’t matter if you approve of the spending or not. Or do you have some sort of learning disablity and are incapable of answering.

Ah .. so what year do you estimate we are going to stop funding the ISS and zero out all human spaceflight spending, 2013, 2014?

Regardless the amount – $3.8B or the $4B I rounded up to – human spaceflight is funded. That debunks your whole proposition that it never will be.

Next you’ll predict that man will fly in heavier-than-air vehicles, but not for many years…

This is so delightfully confused. It’s about $3.8 billion for the budget Congress is working on this year. Actually over 8% less than that once sequestration goes through: $3.5 billion. Oops, that wasn’t in the prophecy! Worse, by confusing this years’ budget with future budgets, thereby pretending that there is some inevitable constant rate per year, you have violated that most basic wisdom about attempts at financial prophecy: “Past performance does not guarantee future results”.

“I’ve soundly debunked these “HSF funding is inevitable” prophecies many times on this forum…”

Apparently not, since NASA has a budget line item called “Exploration” for human exploration, and it is budgeted at about $4B/year.

Reality just ran over your dogma…

Oh no, you’ve brought out your strongest argument of all: ALL CAPS. I guess you win again!

I’ve soundly debunked these “HSF funding is inevitable” prophecies many times on this forum, but since true believers don’t seem to have any long-term memory for any facts or logic that contradict their precious faith, please allow me to quote myself:

‘…the retro-futuristic pretensions of the astronaut cult have never been more vulnerable to political recognition of [the obsolescence of HSF]…. Do you think most voters and politicians are ignorant of the fact that the great astronaut projects of the past led to nothing lasting beyond space junk and museum pieces? There are constant reminders of this. There were news stories just today about one of the shuttles being taken to a museum.

Mitt Romney … tossed Gingrich out of the running for the Republican nomination … by saying he’d fire people who were so ignorant of economics as to propose such [grandiose HSF] “investments”. And he hasn’t proposed any of his own at any funding level. There is not a single current or proposed HSF program that Romney has come out in favor of. Political cost to Romney? Nil. Political benefit to Romney? He did soundly thump Gingrich in every primary election after that debate, when he’d lost the previous one to the former Speaker…

Indeed the Republican platform only speaks of HSF in the past tense, and the Democratic platform doesn’t speak of it at all…In an era of radical reforms such as those to health care, do you think the billions of dollars spent every year on these bizarre gigashrines are going to be ignored? It’s no coincidence that the Republican platform lists NASA under the “Reform” section rather than the “National Greatness” section.’

[I prophecy an undiminishing amount of funding in the future for my cult fetishes]…Stay with us here…Human spaceflight … what is the best way forward with the funding available.

Oops, it looks like I’m “off topic” again by daring to suggest that there are better things to do with our tax money than fund your religious paraphenalia. And that many more taxpayers and election-winning politicians are coming to this realization as well, posing a rather formidable problem to your pretentious prophecy.

Coastal Ron wrote: “Congress and a significant amount of people around the world want to explore space.”

googoo responded “If you really wanted to explore space — as in discover, learn, increase scientific knowledge, uncover any commercial possibilities, and other such fruits of real exploration — you would be spending most of your words in these parts promoting astronomy and planetary science.”

Wow Ron, it is like he has a learning disablity or something.

googoo … you turned a statement NOT about the author, INTO a response about the author…

Does Ron need to drag out a chalkboard and do a flowchart of the statement?

CONGRESS, which represents MILLIONS of people, are freely choosing to allocate tax revenues for human spaceflight and human exploration. Ron was starting from that point as a given, it is going to happen regardless. So if some event is going to happen, if funds are going to flow not matter what … do you understand ‘ no matter what’? Is that concept clear to you? The author, Ron, is stating .. that this funding stream is going to happen regardless of what Ron wants or advocates. Lets call that ..

A GIVEN.

Now starting from that given… what is the best way to allocate those funds. No not for funding robbie the robot, we all know about your robot cult you are constantly pushing, but we are not talking about your cult of mechanics.

The author, Ron, was talking about humans in space and what will give the biggest bang for the buck.. and NO .. it is not about moving the funding away from human spaceflight and to your robot cult funding.

Stay with us here… Human spaceflight .. what is the best way forward with the funding available.

If you really wanted to explore space — as in discover, learn, increase scientific knowledge, uncover any commercial possibilities, and other such fruits of real exploration — you would be spending most of your words in these parts promoting astronomy and planetary science. But just as your interest in “commerce” does not extend much beyond NASA contracts to transport and house your Buzz Lightyear collecton, your interest in “exploration” is little more than a cult interest in building heavenly shrines for our diapered pilgrims.

Of course you are entitled to your religious beliefs. Feel free to review the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution on what that means for government funding of same. And feel free to pass the plate at your next NSS meeting. But stop lobbying the federal government to build your churches.

and yes there have been expensive efforts that have failed

Hundreds of billions of dollars of funds yanked out of the wallets of taxpayers have been squandered on your beliefs, the result being museum pieces and junk sitting at the bottom ocean, scattered across Texas, and posing hazards in LEO. Hundreds of billions ho hum — it’s just other people’s money.

“To lay down a dogma of “next logical steps” in the development of future technologies and frontiers and base national goals on them is to engage in an economic policy akin to, but far more insane than, any Soviet central plan ever was.”

Good grief, someone that rails against planning and exploration.

You seem to be the one beholden to a dogma, in all it’s space-religion glory. It’s like you don’t want anyone touching the sky because it will invalidate your beliefs or something.

In case you haven’t noticed, Congress and a significant amount of people around the world want to explore space. Sure there are disagreements on where to go next and how to do it, and yes there have been expensive efforts that have failed (the Shuttle failing at a number of things, but succeeded at others). Welcome to life on Earth, where nothing is perfect.

But no matter what you say, the exploration of space will still continue – it’s in the nature of humans to keep exploring.

So you can either be constructive in what you suggest (where to go, how much to spend, the goals, etc.), or you can keep acting like the crazy person walking around with the sandwich board that says “The End Is Near” and proclaiming you’re right every time someone dies. I’m hoping you decide to be the former, since we have too many of the later…