Or more to the point, where are they getting the money from? I have a little theory.
Round about the time the 'allied forces' decided to have their second picnic in Iraq there were a lot of stories in the financial sections of most newspapers about the American Govt successfully sueing BAT ( British American Tobacco) for IIRC about $250 Billion.
My figures and facts may be slightly askew but the theme of the prosecution went something along the lines of the tobacco companies holding back information they had gleaned from research on the harms of smoking in the fifties to the seventies.
And I thought to myself ' Well that was good timing for Bush, that's his little war paid for without even denting the coffers.' Add to that that the economy of a nation leaps to the positive after a war so the USA treasurers from a numbers point of view must think this is war is the best thing to happen in a long time.
I dont even think the Govt. should be allowed to sue BAT. In Britain our Govt. does it's own independant research on tobacco, so do the tobacco companies and so do many other watchdog groups. It's the Govt. that puts those warnings onto cigarette packs so that while not infringing freedom of choice, it still lets the consumer know exactly what the pros and cons are.
So the American Govt. should be getting their asses sued by the tobacco companies for not forcing them to put warning signs on packs earlier.
The tobacco barons are just entrepreneurs selling there wares because there is a major demand for it. Just because they are selling the product doesn't mean they have the monopoly on research of the product.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was BAT's idea to suggest to America that they sue BAT. As long as they kick something back. For BAT's contibution to the war effort there could be a lot of company directors and big-wigs sitting with a billion in their bank accounts.
Whats the point of having a multi-billion dollar company if no-one actually gets a billion in their wage-slip from time to time?
Plus when Iraq is Americanised enough BAT are looking at a whole new demographic to sell to and cheaper raw materials no doubt.

Anyway, the theory can apply to the Mars landings. Aliens might want to smoke and BAT can fill that niche. Colonies and the cities of earth immigrants will one day be smoking BAT products on the Red Planet.
But really I don't think any of these assholes can look any further into the future than their bank-balance 20 years from now.

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GOVT. Warning: Do not smoke around children they will badger you for fags.

I don't think the ultimate goal is to fix our economic problems, but the money isn't tied to a rocket and launched into space, it's put into the economy. In addition, the expansive programs mentioned would directly and indirectly employ a lot of people.

Also what is the alternative? Don't man a space mission so that we can fix the economy by ________ .

Fill in the blank.

Also what exactly is so wrong with the economy that it will not heal itself through market forces? And spending money isn't exclusive. You can spend money on a space program AND other things. You also understand deficit spending, correct? The government doesn't have a fixed amount of money that it can spend.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

Robots do it better, cheaper, and safer.

There's really no point sending people on rockets to a dead and deadly place like Mars.

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What others say about boorite!

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Robots do it better, cheaper, and safer.

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As long as they only encounter the expected.

Maybe, but some of the things that have destroyed half the recent probes there might have been avoided had an adaptive mind been in the neighborhood to deal with them.

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ken.kaufman@gmail.com

Yeah when two-thirds of robotic missions to Mars fail I don't know how that is cheaper in the long run.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

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When your vacation is to a place where you might be able to get roof repair supplies that you can't find in your neighborhood, or where you might be able to move to from your leaky house, that vacation could very well be a darn good investment.

Thank you for justifying the space program so well with your analogy.

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It's still cheaper (way cheaper).

And if a third of unmanned missions fail, I am not too encouraged about the prospect of sending less expendable humans up there.

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What others say about boorite!

I understand this as you conceding you are wrong, and I accept your concession. If you have a problem with one of my statements say so, but I don't think you do and are responding out of emotion because you know I am right.

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It's still cheaper (way cheaper).

And if a third of unmanned missions fail, I am not too encouraged about the prospect of sending less expendable humans up there.

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Compared to the amount of research that could be done by humans versus bots I don't think it is cheaper.

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Besides we all know the whole point of this is to stick weapons up in low earth orbit.

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What others say about boorite!

We can't study Mars' soil from earth. Also we can put low earth orbit weapons in space without going to Mars.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

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Maybe because he already had well over 30 billion dollars himself, you goddamned fool?

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I exerted emotion along with the stating of a fact, to emphasize the point. You just exert emotion, to the end of only emphasizing your own stupidity.

I notice you also do not have a response for my statement. You know, the one that made your assertion that we should have just given Saddam 2 billion to make him "be nice" seem completely and utterly ridiculous?

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

Surely you've heard of a payoff before, haven't you? If you weren't blinded by your haze of misdirected anger, you'd see that I said we've paid him money before to do things, so why didn't we this time? We were paying him WHILE he was doing all those bad things you mentioned in the other thread. Don't accuse me of oversimplifying anything when you tried to reduce my point to 'Why don't we pay him money to be nice?'. That's not what I said. I said we've paid him to do what we want in the past, so why did we not pay him to do what we want this time? Open your fuckin' ears, jackass!

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The giant three-phallused phallus of Uzbekistan will one day squirt the cosmic jizz of revenge all over Canada.

He had 30 billion dollars, what good is 2 billion going to do?

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

We can study Mars' soil from earth, but only a little. So... to take a sample and run some analyses on it sounds like a job for a robot.

Of course we can put weapons in LEO without going to Mars. That's not the point. The point is to get us all excited about funding this groovy space technology and then oh by the way, while we're up there how about a phalanx of killer satellites? If we don't do it, China will.

Don't jump to where the point guard is looking. Jump to where the ball is going.

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What others say about boorite!

I still think studying Mars is different than studying things in microgravity on the shuttle, you are going to have an appreciable benefit by having humans there, especially if one of the ultimate goals is colonization.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

It's still cheaper (way cheaper).

And if a third of unmanned missions fail, I am not too encouraged about the prospect of sending less expendable humans up there.

I'm sorry, but I have to disagree on the postulation that humans are less expendable than robots. Sure, robots can be rebuilt, but we're somewhat overpopulated as it is. We have a surplus of humans.

Just my misanthropy kicking in, sorry. :D

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Do you want ants? Because that's how you get ants.

Colonizing Mars??

Colonizing Mars would be orders of magnitude harder than colonizing, say, Antarctica, or the upper slopes of Everest, or the Black Rock Desert, or the ocean floor. Think about colonizing those for a minute, and all the problems you'd encounter. Now multiply those by a hundred or a thousand, and toss in some more, such as low gravity, and utter isolation from other human (or indeed animal) habitations-- and supplies-- and you got Mars. Think about it for a while. It would be hard. Not hard like Jamestown. Hard like Jamestown 90 million miles from home with no breathable atmosphere and no water and much colder and lots of radiation.

And why would we be doing this?

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What others say about boorite!

So more like Newark, New Jersey then.

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I was gonna send a robot back in time, but I got high.

Boorite, your attitude is exactly why you will never be asked to serve aboard the starship Enterprise...FAG.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

I still say we should just launch people in space randomly, aiming roughly towards mars. One of them is bound to survive.

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Do you want ants? Because that's how you get ants.

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Robots do it better, cheaper, and safer.

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You said a mouthfull there and no mistake.

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As soon as we come up with an inexhaustible, portable power source, I'm sure we'll have starships. Serving aboard the Enterprise would seem a lot like being trapped forever in a Marriott, but there are worse things.

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What others say about boorite!