Charles Krauthammer - Closing the new frontier - washingtonpost.com: "The Russians may be new at capitalism, but they know how it works. When you have a monopoly, you charge monopoly prices. Within months, Russia will have a monopoly on rides into space.
By the end of this year, there will be no shuttle, no U.S. manned space program, no way for us to get into space. We're not talking about Mars or the moon here. We're talking about low-Earth orbit, which the United States has dominated for nearly half a century and from which it is now retiring with nary a whimper."
5 comments:
Charles Krauthammer is the Dr. Strangelove of our time. He once yelled at his rabbi for preaching about peace! What a guy.
Krauthammer a jackass, and for once not entirely wrong...but China, and rather more laggardly Japan, India, and more enthusiastically a few years ago Brazil but perhaps with revived interest soon, have all been looking into setting up launching sites, as rather famously has Iran. And it's not quite as if the US is giving up, just putting it on the private sector to step up, which of course a number of folks have been demanding the gummint do for quite some time. Now it's time for put up or shut up...it's also, unfortunately, not too far from the way the NASA program has been in the hands of Beltway Bandits since the Raygun Admin. Albeit with taxpayers, of course, footing the graft bill.
Footing that graft bill from Raygun years till now, that is.
I despise Krauthammer and always have.
Jeff
With all the problems facing us right here on planet Earth, the thought that a few billionaires will have to pay "monopoly prices" to hitch a ride on a Russian space rocket for a low-orbit spin around the globe doesn't distress me unduly.
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