325 Comments

Remind me again why we aren't just having NASA do all of this and why we're handing this over to a private corporation/s? It seems like it will be more expensive when you include a layer of profit that isn't the case with publicly-funded endeavors.

ETA: Yeah, what DesertedPictures said! (I missed it my first passthrough).

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Best case scenario, your shipping takes longer and workers don't have to pee in bottles

Worst case scenario, and probably the most likely one, everything keeps going the same way it is now, but with a different person profiting off the work of others

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Wonder what Bezos is gonna do with all those hot mic Apprentice tapes. And if there could possibly be anything on them that the Cult of the Former Guy would even find objectionable. At this point hearing him say the n word repeatedly would just elicit their admiration.

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still my favorite by Gil. thanks, Robyn.

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Well, there were a hundred reasons for that. Stalin's natural paranoia and mistrust of the West, his hatred for Churchill, the party's mistrust of the West for trying to topple it before the war, hell, little known fact, Patton wanted to rearm the Wehrmacht and use it to invade the USSR. Only his death stopped his increasingly bellicose and irrational tendencies. Then there was the undeniable realization among the former belligerents that a grab for oil was in the making. I'm sure the reasons I've left out have filled bookshelves.

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More to the point, while a return to the Moon is a worthy goal, it is not the sort of critical mission that requires a whole competing program as a backup in case the main program hits a snag. If that happens and the Moon program is delayed for a few years, we can live with it. This is not the Space Race of the fifties and sixties, or the critical task of rebuilding our manned orbital capability following the retirement of the Shuttle, both of which were vital enough to justify competing parallel programs for a while. But delays, setbacks or even failures on a Lunar return program would not involve consequences we couldn't live with.

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If we can send one man to the moon, why can't we send them all there?

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I remember when amazon was just starting and sold only books. They had a commercial where they called NASA and asked them if they could store books on Mars as they had so many and no where to put them. It was amusing. They had a bunch, calling the pyramids, etc. Who could have ever imagined what amazon would become!!!

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ALIEN!! That's all we need to know about about asteroid mining!!

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I love Robyn but this makes me love her more.

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Remember, the 10 billion isn't just for Jeff. Lockheed gets a cut too.

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I don't believe for a second that Alice Kramden was a battered woman. Ralph liked to bluster and way back then it was considered humorous.

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I swore off GM in the 90s because of a really bad experience, but I relented in 2011 and bought a Chevy Cruz ECO and I was so happy with a bought a second one when my first hit 300,000 miles.

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When it comes to guitar amps it's really the only way.

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How would you know this?

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And you can be sure that if Bezos found anything valuable on the moon (gold, Pixie Dust, etc.), he'd manage to appropriate it for himself, even though it was taxpayer money that got him there. Pass.

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