Yes courage is needed, yes it will be dangerous, yes the rewards will no doubt be mighty, and yes there will be casualty along the way, but we are living in an era where capitalism is leading that way… And it’s working, and I’m all in… Space exploration ( and I mean this very literally) is the one and only area that capitalism could work forever,.
It does however need a method of transport to work that is relatively safe., And this is where your argument falls apart. Space travel needs to be as safe as the helicopter to the oil rig.. the courage and bravery you expect shouldn’t be in the commute to work, and that commute is what the astronauts that will mine the first astroid should worry about least..

There will be no shortage of crazy dudes and dudettes that will be all in on whatever crazy mission is the first commercial mining project, and their courage will be natural human courage… But the difference is that they will have a better than a “50-50 chance” , and I think mankind is better for lowering that risk.

All of us here love human space exploration… And the future that will be space exploitation…. Can’t we all gather around , have a hug, accept that we have all (as nations) done awful things , and try to recompense the victims and move on… We have space to explore!!!

It’s the Democratic Party Mission Statement.

Lee advocated that we are not in an era of people with the right stuff, but he is incorrect on that issue. Exploration does not require that we all have the right stuff, only that we have enough people to do the exploration. The rest of us can wait until the most dangerous part is over, so that jet aircraft are safe for passenger flight or that spacecraft are safe enough for a larger number of explorers to go further than the first crews. Keep in mind that the Next Nine followed in the footsteps of the brave Original Seven.

It is OK to have an alternate position, but not OK to insist that the rest of us must follow it. Otherwise we would have that pretty boring, scary place that you fear.

I, for one, am glad you are here. I tire of the echo chambers that some sites rapidly evolve into. Even though you have different opinions and perspectives this doesn’t make you a bad person in my eyes.

I disagree with almost everyone I know about something or another, mostly stuff that I study in depth and they do not.

Frankly, a world were everyone agreed with each other would be a scary place and pretty boring (and a lot of people would be dead).

This is true. The airline industry tried the caution route for decades, only to discover that it does not prevent the unknown problems from occurring. Four decades ago, the American airline industry realized that they were not reducing the rate of accidents, and with the increase in airline travel, they feared that there would be weekly headlines of airliner crashes. They were determined to avoid this, so they changed strategies.

Rather than fix the immediate cause of accidents and problems, they searched for root causes, so that many related problems could be avoided. They changed methods and procedures, and created teams rather than use top-down command. Error prevention became the major task for all workers, because they found that accidents often happened due to a series of errors, and blocking just one error prevents the looming accident. It was thinking smartly, not cautiously, that made airline safety so much better.

This philosophy has been working its way into the space industry. It is why most of Rocket Lab’s and SpaceX’s accidents have been due to unknown unknowns rather than operational errors.

We are working with bleeding edge technologies, and caution does not eliminate the unknowns or give us knowledge of the unknown unknowns. The best that we can do is train for generic problem solving abilities, plan for contingencies, and probe the regions of the unknown. Even today, astronauts and controllers work as teams, training for contingencies and problem solving. If we are too timid or cautious to do that probing, then we will not learn what we do not yet know, and the risks will remain with us. There is only so much that can be learned before putting a human in harm’s way.

Every day, billions of people are willing to take the risk of driving (yet we have not solved the root cause of most auto accidents, operator error), but if we don’t have a few taking the risks of flying or of spaceflight, then they will always be risky.

During WW2 the USA imprisoned 140,000 Japanese Americans for the duration in their own special Internment Camps. Also 35,000 German Americans, 15,000 Italian Americans. Repeating President Wilson’s jailing of 30,000 German Americans during World War One.
Wilson also jailed several thousand persons who opposed his actions before and after the war. Over 650 persons had their Citizenship revoked and were deported from America, including a handful of lawyers who defended them in US courts.
About a dozen real spies for Japan and Germany were known to the FBI and followed before the Pearl Harbor attack. Interestingly they were allowed to leave the USA during the first months of the war.

The USSC while taking up the cases from both wars, waited until the mid 20s and 50s to render decisions on the violation of civil rights to the involved individuals. The Supremes ruled that a President had close to unlimited powers when when a Declaration of War was issued by Congress…think of Lincoln’s actions during the Civil War.
Thus today when people complain that war powers/Use of Force acts are used, they might not like what a President does with such a Declaration. Does anyone like what is being done today under special Health Emergency acts of the 50 states. Think of a setting President welding even more extensive powers from Today’s Oval Office.

The Black Book of Communism places the death toll in action at over 140 million.

Democide a book by Professor Rummel of the University of Hawaii places the death ☠️ of citizens by the hand of their own governments at 300 Million plus during the 20th century, complete with mountains of supporting data at his website.

The Holocaust death toll, using five partial copies of the Nazi ‘Red Cross Card File’ captured during the War, which the German bean counters maintained on everyone they arrested, are at the National Archives Data records facility in Maryland just outside Washington DC. Scholars spent 50 years researching and tallied by name the death of 13,400,000 persons. In 2007, the only known complete copy of the file was found hiding in a Swiss bank vault. The USA sent several C5 Galaxy cargo birds to take the Card File back to Maryland.
After years of digitalizing the horde we now have the names of 18,400,000 souls murdered in the Death Camps.

What other nasty bits are still under seal? John Toland the noted historian of the Pearl Harbor attack, and with his wife one of the only American s ever allowed to read the Japanese Court records of WW2, he was one of only 6,000 persons who could read Emperorial Court Japanese dialect, his wife could also speak the language. Near his death he said that Fleet Admiral King and President Truman had many records on the lead up to WW2 sealed until at least 2045 in the National Archives. Edward R Murrow was a private guest of the Roosevelt’s the weekend of the Pearl Harbor attack. His girl friend of many years wrote in her book that Ed said that the things he was told that weekend would make anyone’s career in Journalism if they published it, and that he had sworn to keep the secrets.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, scholars both in Russia and the West worked together on the Soviet records.
One result was that the total Russian death tolls from the Great Patriotic War rose from the Soviet number of 20,000,000 to 30,000,000.
Stalin’s murder tally reached 62,000,000 with at least another 10,000,000 added for the remainder of the Marxists reign of terror.
After Mao’s death historian Iris Chang and many Red Chinese scholars had a more open interchange for a decade or so. The result is that MAOs death toll now begins at 62,000,000 and maybe 20 million higher. The total new toll from Japans 1931 to 1945 invasion of China is now put at 60,000,000 or more.

Current estimates of the WW2 carnage now run from 50,000,000 to 118,000,000.

With the NEW order that many billionaire leftists are freely funding today, the so-called ‘Great Reset’…..
What new tallies awaits the scholars of the future ?

**”***
NASA cancelled Saturn 5 production in August 1968, nearly a year before the first human walked on the moon. Thousands of Project Apollo workers had already lost their jobs by the time the moon landing took place. Thousands more were furloughed during the ensuing months. Stages for the final two Saturn 5s were completed, test fired, and stored by the end of 1970. NASA accepted the final piece of flight hardware, S-2-15, from North American Aviation in November 1970.

Source
https://www.spacelaunchreport.com/satstg5.html

“….it is now clear for instance, that the machines were at all times not perfectly built….the idea of going to the Moon in the first place was not JFK’s….and at all times the Apollo missions were in political jeopardy….”

I must add that I say this with good will and due respect. When I criticize I do so with the hope it will help make others better.

Which is also why I do not censor criticisms of me. I learn from them.

Lee Stevenson:

Let me outline why I consider your thinking intellectually dishonest:

1. You take all criticisms as personal attacks. Rather than consider the possibility you simply could be wrong, you immediately accuse anyone who criticizes you of insult. You do this consistently. Recognize it.

2. You never rethink what you write, only make excuses. The exchange with mkent this time is a wonderful example. You made a statement, likely written very sloppily, that suggested strongly that the only countries who have had death camps in their past were the U.S. and the U.K. MKent called you on it with actual historical facts that proves the imposition of both socialist and communist ideologies is almost always a horror, and your response was merely make the excuse that you were trying to be funny. You did not acknowledge the tens of millions killed by the ideologies you favor, which when compared with the misbehaviors by the U.K and U.S. show how trivial they were.

I repeat, you never really recognize the faults of your ideology — which though you call yourself socialist and not communist — still like communism requires coercion. You have no problem using the force of government to make everyone support policies you think are good. Just like the communists. And when called on this very obvious fact (which I have in the past) you refuse to admit to it. And it makes all the difference.

3. As to this specific essay and post, your intellectual dishonesty centers on your claim that future exploration will be more cautious than in the past, and thus better. To me, that statement — typical of the government space programs of the past half century — does not face the real dangers of space. You can be cautious or you can be daring, but no matter what you do, space will bite you. Rocket science is hard. Being cautious merely means you will make your mistakes more slowly (as the space shuttle program well illustrated).

I say, better to be daring, and learn more quickly. You will figure out what to do right with great speed, and get done what you want to get done in your lifetime, rather than the eons required by government space programs.

And daring does not be mean being sloppy or unsafe. It just means you have courage, recognize the risk, but push on, rather than have endless meetings and redesigns and conferences and discussions about how to avoid it.

You however want to make believe that extra caution will eliminate the risk. That is fantasy.

I could go on but my point remains. You want to advocate government control and supervision, but you never recognize the problems such supervision entails. And that is being intellectually dishonest.

Quote…

“@Bob. Quote “Lee Stevenson: You wish to live in a fantasy world. “.

A total ad hominem attack. A million miles away from refuting my point that there are more reasons to be cheerful than pessimistic regarding space exploration.”

I still don’t understand why you think I live in a fantasy world? I only pointed out that very many of the points you have said you were waiting for, over the last, what? 15 years? Have come to pass in the last, what? 5 years? And progress is accelerating… Nothing I said was false, it’s not even like I am taking a political viewpoint,.I just think that there is more to look forward to today, at least space wise, than there ever was 50 years ago. And the “right stuff” is in the private investors funding this second space age, and perhaps even in your government officials who see the sense in outsourcing.
I’m not sure exactly what fantasy world you think I’m living in… But with my feet on the ground, and my head in the air… It sure feels kinda real!

What do you mean?

Jordan Peterson & Akira The Don (2018)
“Tarantulas” Friedrich Nietzsche
https://youtu.be/7zIkUkRLJAM
7:59

“Don’t know how bright you are, top three percent, but you ain’t weak, and that’s not nothin’.”

Mal
Firefly ‘Serenity’ 2005

Given the rest of the thread…. I think mankind still has some work to do, just to get along with one another!

Much love.

Now let’s get down to the meat…. A huge percentage of this blog is now taken up by Bob (rightly!) Pointing out how your left are censoring free speech. We are all against that… Right?

Quote “Mankind will never be at peace until every last spark of communist thought is eradicated from the earth, ”

Do you see the flaw here?

I am a socialist, not a communist, and I disagree VENOMOUSLY with most of the political standpoints of most of the posters here, but I would never, ever deny their right to hold their position. To advocate for any sort of thought to be (quote) “eradicated” speaks volumes on the position you hold….

“were (sic) in a death-struggle with chinese communist expansion, and all 90 million CCP members must be destroyed, totally and completely”

I find that you ( Edward with a capital E) and I actually agree on many issues. Not so much your less capital namesake.

As for if you should take anything I say seriously… That is all up to you. I speak it as I see it, if it’s worth making a little fun of, I just might, but on the whole, I speak my mind. I am a little disappointed that you didn’t take the time to read the whole thread, then you would have realized I wasn’t targeting you with the whole “genocide” palaver.

It is hard to tell. Are you being flippant again, or are you lying about me “calling for the death of millions of men, women and children?” I said no such thing, so it looks for all the world like mkent is right and you are just trolling.

“You guys don’t really get irony or self deprecating humour do you?”

Or are you saying that we should not take seriously anything you say, because it is flippant self deprecating ironic humor? Why should we bother reading your comments anymore? They used to be serious, or seemed to be, but now you tell us they are not.