[kasperl]

money doesn't make people happy, but no money does make them unhappy.

[Rictor]

What is required to affect significant and lasting change (in any area) is money+attitude. Having either or those two, though not perfect, is still very much better than nothing. Its naive to say that since money doesn't solve everything, spending money on anything is useless.

Oh and, sorry for hijacking the thread. Reurn to your regularly scheduled space exploration talk stuff..

[Corsair114]

Seriously, I'd love to know exactly where all this money is going to come from, my bet would be relatively unimportant stuff like Health and Education.

Edumacation? Wuzzhat?

(4) Within 20 years after the date of enactment of this Act, the development and flight demonstration of a reusable space vehicle capable of carrying humans from low Earth orbit to and from Martian orbit, the development and deployment of a human-tended habitation and research facility on the surface of one of the moons of Mars, and the development and flight demonstration of a reusable space vehicle capable of carrying humans from Martian orbit to the surface of Mars and back.

I wanna go! I wanna go!

[silverwolf]

i guess this means we're one step closer to freespace lol

[pyro-manic]

Dear god, I hope not! While it's a very cool game, I don't particularly fancy being vapourized from high orbit by a ship full of five-legged spidery things....

Yeah, it's a good step, though - I think that space exploration and colonization could be the key to getting humans to act halfway decent towards each other at least some of the time, and stop these pointless bloody wars all over the place...or am I just being idealistic?

[Carl]

call your congressman and tell him you support the space exploration act

[Liberator]

Originally posted by pyro-manic
Yeah, it's a good step, though - I think that space exploration and colonization could be the key to getting humans to act halfway decent towards each other at least some of the time, and stop these pointless bloody wars all over the place...or am I just being idealistic?

Mildly Idealistic.  Advancments in space travel simply mean that instead of dropping a few thousand pound of aircraft on a city the terrorists can drop a few hundred thousand pounds much more expensive and volitile spacecraft on a city.

Also, most of the "Pointless" are religious in nature and the conflicts won't cease just because the race can travel beyond LEO on a regular basis.  The only way to stop them is for one side or the other to have complete, total, undeniable victory over the other.  Such as the US over Japan in WW2.  

This will be a controversial statment, but the argument could be made that the bomb "saved" Japan from being a second tier nation, instead of the world class economy it is today.  Of course you won't get any of the survivors to agree to this, and it doesn't stop it from being a horrific act.  But it probably did save more lives than it took.