What with all the high-tech job layoffs and outsourcing and stuff in recent years, this article about a former Lunar Module engineer now doing home inspections for a living makes me very sad. And very angry at our government. And our people.
You know...the people who caused the death of the lunar program because they were upset that flights to the moon (to the MOON!) were interrupting their re-runs (RE-RUNS!) on TV. Despite the fact that every dollar we put into NASA has come back tenfold in research that has improved out lives and health and everything else.
And now we're to the point that we don't have the ABILITY (or even the designs, so I'm told) to make a spacecraft that will go to the moon. They just recently thought to start preserving the last remaining Saturn 5 boosters, which had been laid out on it's side to rust for the last 30 years. Idiots.
Jerry Pournelle once said that he always knew we'd go to the moon....he just didn't think we'd do it and then STOP going.
I've long been disappointed with our government....and with our people for letting them slack off. There is no vision anymore, like Kennedy had for putting a man on the moon. Though even that was part political...gotta keep up with them Commies!
I've got to find that saying my dad had framed and hung on the wall from his office. It's by John F. Kennedy, and I think it's from his book "Profiles In Courage":
"Where there is no vision, people PERISH."
Outsourcing all our manufacturing AND high-tech jobs to other countries all in the almighty name of profit is WRONG. It's TREASON, if you ask me. It's short term profit-taking decisions like these that will be the death of this country if we don't watch out. Overzealous "Communism" was ultimately the death of the Soviet Union. How ironic would it be if overzealous capitalism was the ultimate cause of death of the USA?
Sigh.
