First New Manned Rocket In 30 Years?

Obama Has File On Desk Under Afghanistan Troop Plans...


While the media was busy writing about "The Balloon Boy" and the President's basketball skills and FOX News obvious Right Wing bias, I've been paying attention to NASA's being busy readying the first test flight of a new generation of space vehicles designed to place men in orbit after the Space Shuttles retire...eventually evolving into having the capability to put Homo Sapiens back on the moon sometime in the year 3000 or something.

Take a look at the Ares I-X rocket on the pad in the background with the Space Shuttle in the foreground...

(From http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/091026-nasa-ares-1x-shuttle-snapshots.html)

While I'm happy that NASA has finally been allowed to address the replacement of the aging shuttle fleet, it also disgusts me that it's going to take longer to get a new spacecraft developed and get back to the Moon than it did in the 1960's.

How can it take a few rooms full of men wielding calculators with more computational power than the original Apollo Command Module's computer LONGER than it did a bunch of nerds with slide rules and pocket protectors to design a new moon rocket?

Have we fallen that far intellectually?

Or is the problem more insidious and basic?

Besides the obvious POLITICAL over/undertones, could it be that we as Americans--American Engineers--aren't cut from the same cloth as our predecessors of 40 years ago?

Do we not have the design and conceptual skills, are our colleges not teaching the fundamentals and leading us to prosper mentally and advance science at the same rate seen in the second half of the 20th century?

Or is it just that EVERYTHING is so damned %$#@ up and mucked up and glued together with the slimy funk of cultural and social decay...weighted down with the dumbing down of the American people in general...and held back by artificial demands for considerations of false self esteem...bankrupt under the burden of government mandates and funding of social "entitlement" programs which divert perfectly good money to the clamoring masses with baggy assed pants singing the lyrics of the latest rap/hip-hop song from memory while at the same time being unable to quote the pythagarean theorem.

Naaaaa...it's probably just bad luck or a result of the war on Terror/Al Quaeda and possibly the effects of global warming I guess...


That will be all...for now...

Dammit...