Why didn't the US return to the moon???

I'm just trying to figure out if you were trying to make some kind of play on words when you said "looner" or if you don't know that it's spelled "lunar".

You're dead wrong about that. America cared a great deal about beating the Soviet Union in the space race. The thing was that by the time Apollo 13 was launched we had already won by being the first to put men on the moon with Apollo 11 and with that race won were tired of the same old, same old. It would take two little ships called Enterprise (named after the most famous Enterprise of them all, the USS Enterprise NCC-1701) and Columbia to rekindle our national enthusiasm in the space program. Of course, after a while the space shuttle became commonplace and it took first Hubble, then the Mars Rover missions, to make us proud of the US space program once again. I myself hope for a manned mission to Mars, working in conjunction with China, Russia and Japan; it would be an event that would unite our countries in pride, crossing political and ideological boundaries, if only for a little while.

investment vs return



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GpWV1oKH0w

I hope it is.

For those who don't know, "zetatalk" is run by a woman named Nancy. Nancy claims to be in contact with an alien civilization on a planet orbiting the star Zeta Reticuli.

You may ask how they communicate with her--she says it's through the device they implanted in her brain.

I wish I was making that up.

Given who runs it, you can judge how reliable the info there is.

You know, that brings up an interesting point. So - certain types of mentally disturbed people have a long history of this tin-foil-hat practice, hence the stereotype you reference. My question is this. Metal deflects certain energy waves. Is it possible that these mentally disturbed people have some sort of biological vulnerability to certain pervasive energy waves (microwaves, whatever) that the rest of us don't have (or to phrase it differently, that the rest of us have some sort of built-in defense that they don't have), and the tin foil hats actually DO help? I mean, there is plenty of evidence that they tend to self-medicate (substance abuse), probably in an unconscious attempt to bring their biochemistry up to speed; this could be a similar thing. People tend to dismiss the obvious, maybe it's a case of Occam's razor.

Yeah, whatever. Back to the moon.

Lethe

Excellent post. Agree completely, especially that last paragraph.

Our only hope is with private investors and space tourism.

You really have to be nuts to think we didn't go to the moon, sorry but keep your tinfoil hat on and stay off the internet (they're watching you).

We gave up on the moon because of the Saturn V rockets. They weren't the most reliable, the were extremely expensive, and there was no way to reuse or recycle any part of it. The space shuttle we've been using was reusable and didn't have the ponies to make it back to the moon. That and there was really no good reason at the time to keep going back. (risk vs reward) We get all the research we need from space missions and the space station. With the technology we have now, we could colonize the moon and that's why the space program was retired for the next generation of rockets that our wonderful president canned.

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