well the spacecraft that spent 3 years and a few million dollers runing around the sun capturing atual solar particals, of course crashed into the New Mexico desert, letting lose from space on earth what was made to stay in space. Sounds like a good plot for a doomsday movie. Except of course it is true
Yeah, how many starving kids could have been fed with that money? How many people living on the street could've been housed? How much medicine could that buy for those in poverty? But all it did was feed ashes to the desert... You know why a rocket is shaped like a phallus? We've already fucked the earth so now we're doing our best to fuck space.
To put things into perspective, the Genesis spacecraft cost about $160 million. We've spent 1220 times as much on Iraq already with much more spending to come. We could fund the entire budget of NASA for over 13 years with what we've spent on Iraq. We could fund the entire budget of the National Science Foundation for 200 years with what we've spent on Iraq.
We're constantly pissing off our space brethren. They know of the problems on our mother earth that we constantly ignore and we should be ashamed. Again, it all goes into the vast hole called...greed. They want no part of us right now...can't blame them.
NASA tends to take a lot of criticism because their projects are open to the public and subject to scrutiny, whereas military programs are kept secret and are not open to criticism. Billion dollar missile defense launches (among other things) have their failures regularly, but the press hardly talks about it. I've worked on research projects for both the military and NASA. Sometimes projects fail at NASA, but I can't even begin to tell you the amount of waste in the military. I wish they could be held accountable to the public like NASA. One of the most short-sighted policies I've seen from the military was the intentional explosions of satellites for the missile defense system. It has left a reign of garbage in Earth orbit that NASA doesn't even know how to get rid of. I'm sure some NASA project to cleanup the orbital debris will have a failure and everyone in the press will blame NASA instead of the military that put all of that junk up there in the first place.
Its unfortunate the space craft crashed but much of the information being provided by the craft's numerous sensors have been recovered along with some major pieces of the structure. All things considered, I would say the mission was very successful.
Everything went perfectly until the parachute was supposed to deploy. It even landed exactly on track (Utah, not NM). So yes, we know a lot of things that worked right and will be used again. BTW, this was the first sample return mission since the Apollo project.
Don't gety me wrong I am not knocking Nasa at all. gave us so much over the years, the money spent on the space prgram filters down to us prety quickly, where would computers and such be without the space program
The modern computer was partly due to people studying the effects of impurities on the electrical conductivity of semiconductors in the 40s and 50s. If we had asked anyone back then, they would have most likely said it was a waste of money to even be studying such things. From the impurity studies came the diode, transistor, integrated circuit, and compact electronic computers. Another contributor was the rise of modern physics around the turn of the century (relativity, wave mechanics, etc). No one today would be able to explain the electrical phenomena of semiconductors without modern physics theory. It's rather mindboggling what emerges from basic science and research.
