Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Mars Schmarz

Maybe I'm the only one, but I do not give a #^#$% about the latest Mars rover.

Well, actually I do.  I dislike it and wish we'd stop wasting money on crap like this.

People, have we not been getting photos of Mars from rovers since 2004? Is this not old hat? Will we ever find Mars' "good side" and get the photo we've been looking for?

This latest photo shoot cost $2.5 billion (about a billion over budget). Apparently we want to find out if life ever existed there.

Of course life existed on Mars. Has NASA never watched Bugs Bunny?

Why is the JPL the lucky recipient of a seemingly permanent, federally funded, high wage, full employment program? They've been on the gravy train long enough!

And they say that political science research is useless and should be defunded! While that may be true, it's way way way better than the NASA-JPL cabal.





10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Exactly

Anonymous said...

I don't give a hoot either, but Neil deGrasse-Tyson made a great case for space exploration on the Daily Show many months ago. We need space exploration because it captivates the minds of young people. The Space Race inspired many great minds to pursue engineering and science, which lead to many of the innovations that make our lives so great. Today, we have a huge deficit of motivated students to enter STEM programs and help humans take the next great leap forward. Kids used to admire and want to be an astronaut or President when they grow up--now they look up to and want to be a douchebag like Kanye West or Ashton Kutcher.

Angus said...

Kanye West has done more for the world than everyone who has ever worked at JPL combined!

Anonymous said...

Yeah, who needs NASA or other government agencies for their research even if that means we end up with by-products like water purifier or better smoke detector from their research on space exploration. The research and development that went into landing Curiosity will probably be used in other areas. And that's not even talking about the rover's sensors. Here's a great response from NASA to a question asked by a nun about why we should explore space when we could better use the money to help people: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

That's not to say we should put 100% of our money towards it. It's good to see NASA working with and letting private companies like SpaceX take more and more responsibilities as I believe that will really accelerate the space exploration and the technology behind it, but NASA has played an important role so far and will continue to. Don't downplay that.

Anonymous said...

Exploring space is fine, but a mission to Venus would have far greater benefits.

Anonymous said...

Yo Angus. Externalities can be positive, you dork.

Norman said...

Yes, externalities can be positive, but rent-seeking is pretty wasteful last time I checked, too. Would the spillovers from NASA really go away if the resources were used elsewhere? What is Seen and What is Not Seen, folks.

Angus said...

Guys: arguing in favor of a useless activity because it creates positive externalities is not a very strong argument.

Look, that 2.5 Billion could have funded a lot of prizes for the successful completion of some particular achievement.

Let JPL go cry in their Tang!

Anonymous said...

"useless activity": a social science that is unable to predict the behavior it purports to study.

Eric said...

+1 bazillion