Ares 1-X is launched!

I thinks it's awesome! After weather postponed the launch yesterday, it took off today. Looked great! Too bad it's only taken us 40 years to get back to where we were in 1969... oh, wait, it's worse than that.

Ares will carry 'Orion' which is the little Apollo-esque capsule that "will be the Earth entry vehicle for lunar and Mars returns... Orion is scheduled to fly its first missions to the space station by 2015 and carry out its first sortie to the moon by 2020."

So, it's actually going to take us another 11 years to get to where we were 40 years ago. Thank you, my government, for pissing away 40 years of work with underfunding, bad management and political paybacks. If you just let scientists and engineers do what they want, the way they want, we'd have a program that works and works a lot more cheaply.

If you take the same approach to running NASA for the last 40 years, give it a budget of nearly half the federal discretionary spending, you'd get the US military.

The difference would be that all the spending would have resulted in a gazillion amazing scientific discoveries that would have provided cheap, clean power for all (ZERO dependance on fossil fuels -- no more angry arabs), cheap sources of food/nutrition (no more starving peoples), and cheap, on-demand medical resources ('public option' not needed).

Can you say 'United Federation of Planets'? Can you say 'Star Trek' is real? That's where we'd be if the roles were reversed and the NASA budget were 30 TIMES the size of the DoD budget (and that's just DoD ops -- it doesn't include VA, HomeSec, etc.)

It would truly have been cheaper in terms of dollars and lives to develop new tech to solve the world's problems and GIVE IT AWAY than it would to try to get the world to do things the way we want at GUNPOINT.

Of course, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.