Let's do it without government

"Mining the Sky" by John S. Lewis is a great read. He points out that "the last three Saturn 5 boosters,  already built and paid for, were laid out as lawn ornaments at Cape Canaveral, Marshall Space Flight Center, and Johnson Space Center, to rust into ruin and serve as a testimony to the futility of that dream. Only governments can afford to spend a quarter of a billion dollars each for the equivalent of plastic flamingos." Then he describes the fate of the tools and dies, sold pennies on the dollar (a 20 billion dollar investment) and melted down for scrap. The plans donated to a Boy Scout paper drive. And the last of plans in the Federal Records Archives in Atlanta are "lost". So much for GOVERNMENT intelligence. The whole space effort was a geopolitical stunt based on lies. Evidently President Eisenhower financed U2 effort to find out if Russia had ICBM's. They found out they had FOUR.  JFK got elected on the fear of a  "missile gap" that did not exist. JFK knew that.  Lack of intelligence, foresight, imagination, or even "hindsight" for that matter. Lack of accountability to the public. Central planning sucks. Government is untrustworthy.

Capitalism can achieve Space development for us. Paradoxically Hong Kong is the only place on Earth right now that has been left untouched by government regulation. China doesn't mess with it because it WORKS and pays them dividends. You can get a business "license" with ONE form filed. It has the number one economy and the most freedom. We are a mixed socialism/capitalism economy and number 9 on the list of economies. Pure socialist countries rank at the bottom of the list in the 170's.  That should be informative to China, USA, and the rest of the world, but somehow escapes notice of supposedly intelligent people. We have a long way to go.

So many problems. We need real solutions. Governments will not do that for us. Abundance of resources and energy await us in space. We will only mature as a species when we are able to open up this frontier. We need to get to work on it NOW without government.

Survival

"Can America Survive" by John Hagee points out in Part one of the book Nuclear Iran's plan of attack on 7 cities in the USA. He tells of British agents already catching a terrorist with a suitcase/backpack nuke. He says the bombs are already here since our borders to the south are non existent. EMP pulse can send us into the dark ages starving millions as electricity shuts off everything from the grid to vehicles that won't run and gas pumps that won't pump. Tractors won't plant crops. And trunks won't stock the grocery stores. Planes will fall out of the sky. When Iran has the rockets and bombs enough to do Israel "off the map" they will only hold off only long enough to do us in at the same time. They can launch medium range missiles from cargo ships off our coast. How much canned food do you have stored by? No, that's not enough. Plan better.

"Survival with Style is the name of a series of articles in the 70's by Dr. Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. Space development leads to abundance of resources, and expanded frontier, and HOPE that the species can have some of its' eggs in another basket if this one should stop having a history or someone to tell it.


The old boy scout in me says "Be Prepared". Prepare for the worst and hope for the best. READ "Patriots" by James Wesley, Rawles. It is a novel cloaked as a readable survival guide to TEOTWAWKI or " the end of the world as we know it". His blog is survivalblog.com .


The last shuttle has flown. We have to do it on our own. Join me in brainstorming that process.