Remember when NASA did cool things like put people in space, land on the moon, inspire a generation to engineering and science and in general, not suck?

Yeah, neither do I actually. Maybe my parents do, but I haven’t seen a lot to impress at this point.  Nor do I see a quick return to the glory days of old if this fine parachute design for the new Orion Capsule is any indication.

The sad part is, I really support the idea of the space program, the lofty goal of finding new places to explore and expanding the human frontier. But this is just yet another areo-space contractor design foul-up that probably just cost you, me and everyone else except John McCain (he doesn’t pay taxes because he’s actually Dick Chenny’s remote-control droid) $20 we really need to spend on gas.

NASA, in reality seems to be just one more lethargic component of the cold-war aparatus that we just don’t know what to do with, so it just goes on blithely fulfilling it’s purpose to build bigger missiles, I mean rockets, while the Europeans and everyone else pull ahead in physics in search of more elegant solutions. We can’t even make a capsule land on the ground with a parachute like they did in the 50′s. And you want to get to Mars? In that? Tell you what, lets put all the rockets away for a bit, adequately fund our schools for say 10 or 20 years, and see what kind of space ship designs you get out of that. Might suprise you.