Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Relevance, redefined...

NASA has offered to put a man on the moon...at a cost of $104 billion, and claims to be able to do it by the year 2018. Apparently, there's an entire generation or two who've never experienced the thrill of seeing man walk on the moon. These future "astronauts" can expect to find a lot of rocks, and...um...traces of the missions that were sent there over thirty freakin' years ago. The Crayon-tinted graphics that were shown on the news channels yesterday looked like they wouldn't have seemed out of place when JFK announced the first-generation moon ventures. The two scientists shown discussing the upcoming missions were sitting on a set that appeared to be made up of items pulled from a high school science competition. Granted, our moon rock supply was probably exhausted years ago, but is this really necessary? If I were a Sony product developer, could I expect to keep my six-figure salary by announcing a product that looked and functioned suspiciously like an old Atari game console (I'm digging for an analogy--I don't think any sort of game console existed 36 years ago).

Burt Rutan (SpaceShip One) could probably do this for $37.50, and he'd have you bouncing around on the moon in two weeks' time.

2 Comments:

Blogger Momo said...

I'd pay $104 billion for an Atari!!

Yayyyy!! I bought an Atari, yayyyy!!!

8:56 AM  
Blogger Lori Stewart Weidert said...

For NASA, space is still a high priority.

---Dan Quayle


$104 Billion? That's a punch in the stomach. How can they justify it? I have to read more!

11:48 AM  

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