Starship Asterisk*

Anything they would want to do with it would be better than having it spent on moon dust. The sooner NASA is shut down the better for the US. NASA has no relevant mission. It is just a self-serving bureaucracy. This is the golden age of biology. That is were NASA's budget should be spent.

There's nothing beautiful about $280 million flushed down the toilet. That money should have been spent on health and disease prevention research by the FDA. LADEE is just another NASA boondoggle, trying to justify its existence. NASA desperately wants manned missions to Mars or back to the Moon. Ne...

Curiosity is a $2.5 billion boondoggle that proves NASA ought to be shutdown. NASA is desperate to stoke public interest in a manned mission to Mars, but no one cares. It's all just white-collar welfare for an agency that has had no real purpose since the last moon landing in the '70s. The money sho...

The rovers are a technological tour de force, but their greatest benefit is to show that Mars is simply a dead desert and not worth spending more taxpayer's dollars on.

Outpost? To what, Mars? It's a boring desert too. This is just NASA fantasy. Manned space flight is almost finished, at least for Americans. In the distant future perhaps hyper-intelligent, non-biological machines that can withstand cosmic ray particles will venture into interstellar space.

To the APOD moderator: If you can't find anything interesting to show related to astronomy, how about showing some old photos of NASA's glory days of the 50s through the 60s?

The issue is not high-speed air travel, it's the time that passengers spend in airports plus the time getting to and from the airports. We need a supersonic aircraft like we need another Space Shuttle or ISS or moon landing.

Hooray! Now the USA can send rich tourists to the ISS.

It's an image of taxpayer dollars being wasted to support the NASA hobby shop. NASA is nothing more than white-collar welfare. My favorite idiotic program is blasting the moon to see if enough water exists there to support a manned habitat. We ain't goin' to send no men to the moon again, to mars, o...

lack experience in R & D

I've spent over 20 years in basic R&D. But R&D experience isn't necessary for a taxpayer to be disgusted with NASA's performance.

Also, your posts display your immaturity.

NASA is the R & D department for the US

Wake up Dr. Rip Van Skeptic. Silicon Valley, CA and Route 128, MA have been the USA technology development centers for the past 40 years.

... so are you really sure that you want to spend money on BOTH? I'm sure I don't want to spend money on a sclerotic bureaucracy no longer capable of "moon-shot" projects, whereas the biotech industry is capable of such advances in science and technology. The only similarity between NASA ...

Every Mars mission to date has produced huge breakthroughs..

All they've shown is that Mars is a dead rock. What a surprise.

And current knowledge of stellar formation is highly advanced.

Fundamental research isn't, and shouldn't be, limited to producing "useful, practical technology". Of course you are right; however, building Kepler, a new Mars rover, and returning to the Moon require little fundamental research and will produce few spinoffs that couldn't be developed mo...

Much of the technology that makes medical research possible wouldn't even exist but for the spinoffs of space science. Of course it would exist: "Necessity is the mother of invention." Kepler, another Mars rover, and returning the Moon are highly inefficient means of developing useful, pr...

Pray tell, what do you consider is a good use of money?

How about a cure for insidious diseases such as cancer, diabetes, or ALS? Or how about halting global warming?

What an absurd waste of money! It makes you wonder how much intelligent life there exists on earth. Certainly there isn't any at NASA's management. NASA is white-collar welfare at its worst. The agency should be shut down and its budget given to NOAA. Kepler is even more useless than the new Mars ro...

NASA is giving $160k to a NY advertising firm to promote the moon settlement program. Evidently taxpayers are not enthusiastic about investing $230 billion for all the wonderful technology that will spin off from this gigantic boondoggle. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/...

It was those evil aliens.

First, the Hubble telescope. It was a success after its mirror was fixed, at an extra cost to the taxpayer of several hundred million dollars. Now, NASA is going to refurbish it, again at cost of several hundred million. The telescope is obsolete. The one at Paranal is much superior. Hubble serves a...

Guys, NASA isn't the only government-funded agency capable of doing the highest quality research that can produce equally valuable spin-offs, and much more cheaply at that. Second, the purpose of the Apollo mission wasn't science--it was political: to show the Russians and the rest of the world that...

NASA desperately wants to send astronauts to Mars. It's obvious to anyone with the slightest common sense that there is nothing an astronaut can do on Mars that a robot can't do as well and much, much more cheaply. Similarly for Moon exploration. Mars is simply a dead desert. The only planet that ne...

Clearly you are an expert at ignorance.

If there is one thing that the Moon missions and the Mars rovers have shown, it is that we need to expend our resources and employ the talents of our scientists and engineers toward saving the Earth from environmental destruction, not wandering around (almost surely) dead planets.

See

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060406.html

for more 'evidence' of water.