The reader who submitted this photo provides context,
This is the Space Shuttle Discovery on its final flight to a museum. A foreign tourist had told me they were at the Space Center to witness this event and how great it was. I told them that it actually was a sad event because they were witnessing the decline of a once great country. Instead of putting our resources into space exploration and potential colonization, we instead diverted trillions to welfare programs, importing and adopting the third world, and fighting wars in savage lands that were of no threat if we just left them alone to kill each other in peace.
So I give you a more subtle Goodbye America photo. This represents the passing of the technological and pioneering dominance that built the country. In exchange we traded down for welfare, warfare, and multicultural malaise that is causing the whole place to revert to the miserable mean of humanity. Bon appetit.
“This represents the passing of the technological and pioneering white male dominance that built the country.”
In the not too distant future, America’s greatest achievements will only be recollected in tales and admired by curiosity seekers in musty museum rooms. The museums will be gated.
Goodbye, America (in a photo) 
The Space Shuttle program was an enormous boondoggle.
The average shuttle launch cost $1.5 billion. A SpaceX rocket launch costs 1/100th that price. (And it’s made by Americans, in America. And it’s a private enterprise. Whether Elon Musk qualifies as a white guy is a matter of interpretation, I suppose.)
We were pissing blood and treasure down a pipe on the shuttle program; now, we have a perfectly competitive, home-grown, private-sector space program that includes both SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (Boeing / Lockheed Martin).
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There is truth to what you say, except to compare it strictly to a SpaceX program, one that wasn’t founded until 2002, and didn’t actually launch anything into space until 2008, is an apples to oranges comparison with a shuttle program that began in the 1970’s.
I will grant you that the 40 or so launches that SpaceX has done is nothing to sneeze at. And if they can do it cheaper, and get living people into space and back, all the better.
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How much did a 1MB hard drive cost in 1980?
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This is possibly the saddest photo of all. A country can put up with a certain number of dumb sluts, idiot egalitarians, and feckless thugs, and still thrive, up to a point. But when a country loses it’s spirit of adventure and enterprise, that’s it, game over. I know all of the arguments against space exploration in general, and the Shuttle in particular, but it’s still a sad day for this country.
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I had to do a double take, that thing is filthy as fuck. I checked to see the last flight, 2011, in case it was more recent, in which case it might be space dirt. Nope, looks like the fucking thing sat around getting mold and mildew growing on it and just nobody gave two shits to wash the fucking thing. I quess concern and fucking soap are no longer part of our space program. Sad.
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Was America truly DOMINANT as a pioneering and technological power? The Russians had Sputnik and Gagarin.
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Yes, absolutely it was, and still is, for now.
It was America’s technological powers that caused Russia to fold like a cheap suit in the late 80’s.
Then America folded.
For now, the US is still coasting along on it’s previous greatness, but as succeeding generations are increasingly made less educated and intelligent, it will eventually all come crashing back down.
Another country may take the lead. Who knows, Americans might even still benefit from it.
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More educated and less intelligent*
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Yeah, the Soviets did the best they could with what they had, and Gagarin was a brave and talented man (he was a Christian, by the way) but I’d invite you to compare an Apollo capsule to a Soyuz. In fact, the Soviet program was very largely the creation of one brilliant man, Sergei Korolov, and when he died, the Soviets lost steam. As an example, Korolov designed the Soyuz space vehicle in the Mid-1960’s and the Russians are STILL using it. There’s no doubt that the U.S. program was superior.
As for SpaceX, I’m pulling for them, but you can call me when they reach the moon. Anyone who uses SpaceX as a refutation of the demise of America as a spacefaring nation is in denial.
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I meant the respective accomplishments. They got 2 out of 3. (first space probe and first man in space vs first men on the moon)
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All Soviet technology was stolen from the West by communist traitors. Do your research.
Actually I shouldn’t say “traitors”, since most of the members of the spy rings were Jews, not Americans. Like the Rosenberg communists, who gave nuclear secrets to the USSR in the hope that they would attack the West with nuclear weapons.
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It’s not widely remembered given our lefty media that the US and USSR had a gentleman’s agreement in the 50’s that the US would develop safe space programs and then share with the Russians. The Commies reneged with a change of government and started sending up crap to have ‘firsts’ killing many astronauts in the process before Gagarin, Laika the dog, useless junk like Sputnik, and even a phony space walk ‘first’ etc. when not blowing themselves up by the hundreds on the launchpad.
The US could have sent beeping beer cans into low-oribit ‘space’ in 1947. It had sense.
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Comparing this to SpaceX is missing the point. Where would trillions of dollars be better spent over this time period: On welfare and wars in third-world toilets, or continuing space exploration even if on government inefficiency terms? What the U.S. did in the 1960s to put a man on the moon was the pinnacle for our nation in most likelihood. The mind wanders of what could have been if we didn’t get distracted with trying to fix the planet.
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I believe the night of the moon landing some black, I think a preacher who was close to mlk, was agitating to divert the funds from the space program to his fellow blacks.
Space travel be ryaciss n sheet.
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http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/2014/06/when-new-york-times-published-article.html
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/022187.html
On the eve of the Apollo 11 launch, July 15, 1969, [Ralph] Abernathy arrived at Cape Canaveral with several hundred members of the poor people to protest spending of government space exploration, while many Americans remained poor. He was met by Thomas O. Paine, the Administrator of NASA, whom he told that in the face of such suffering, space flight represented an inhuman priority and funds should be spent instead to “feed the hungry, clothe the naked, tend the sick, and house the homeless.”
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On welfare and wars in third-world toilets, or continuing space exploration even if on government inefficiency terms?
Are that the only choices? You can only imagine government spending the money, and you can only imagine either meaningless space trips or welfare? You can’t imagine simply not taking the money in the first place, but let private citizens and businesses keep it to produce wealth and research, actually improving people’s lives?
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I remember watching the shuttle/747 combo over London around the mid-80s. Magnificent sight (as was Concorde coming in along the Thames every evening at 6 pm).
http://londonist.com/2010/03/the_day_the_space_shuttle_came_to_l.php
My kids can’t get round the fact that men were walking on the moon from 1969-73. Great days.
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Indeed. We traded space-explores for social workers who pamper crack babies.
Makes me sick.
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No. That’s a false choice by neocons who want to take an easy stab at Obama. Which is funny, because they are as socialist as he is. Are you seriously saying that the only two things money can be spent on are space trips and welfare?
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Let’s not forget that Texas did not get one of the shuttles for a museum, but California did. Why? Obama-Rick Perry politics.
Houston, we have a petty snub.
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A quaint little poem from the time; note the references to paying rent, taxes, etc.
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey’s on the moon)
I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.
(while Whitey’s on the moon)
The man jus’ upped my rent las’ night.
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
I wonder why he’s uppi’ me?
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon?)
I wuz already payin’ ‘im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin’ my whole damn check,
Junkies makin’ me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin’ up,
An’ as if all that shit wuzn’t enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an’ arm began to swell.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Was all that money I made las’ year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain’t no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon)
Y’know I jus’ ’bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I’ll sen’ these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)
Gil Scott-Heron
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Dammit, that one’s just depressing.
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NASA is just a propaganda machine with the sole purpose of getting more money for itself. There were twelve trips to the moon within a few year, and guess what? The moon didn’t get better any of those times. Do you want to grow corn there? Open a mine, perhaps? There’s nothing to do on that rock. It’s good that they didn’t go a thirteenth time.
Keeping people in space after that served zero purpose. “Space exploration”? There was no “exploration”, they were orbiting earth in satellites. They had nothing to do except staying there for the cameras. The “research” they did was things like bring up ants and see what they’ll do in zero gravity. “Research” that was bogus, just to have some justification for the monumental waste.
We don’t have technology for mining anything in space, nor do we need to since we have – literally – only scratched the earth’s surface. There are thousands of times more minerals in the earth than we have brought up. We don’t have technology to colonize other planets, nor is there a point in doing so. Maybe far, far into the future people will do it out of boredom, if they discover a scientific miracle that makes it easy.
But any such science has to be done on earth. Where the labs are, where the facilities are, where the powerful computers are. Where the mathematicians are. Nothing gets done on a space station. Do your research, boys and girls. Instead of oohing and aaahing at government’s bombastic waste.
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“Keeping people in space… served zero purpose” says the person as he writes on a 21st Century Computer that was built with technologies and uses technologies originally developed for the Space program..
The dividends from the science and engineering fetes of NASA from the 1940’s to 1980’s and the hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers who pushed material science, computer science, aerodynamic science, medical science and communications science are what is allowing this collapsing nation to coast for a few more years.
Give a scientist a lab and a goal and something new and wonderful will come from it. Give a crack-head free food, welfare and healthcare – you get thousands more crackheads. Funny how the “poor” all enjoy extremely comfortable living standards by historical comparisons, all thanks to the advancements of science made possible by the US Space program.
Think of how many homies lives have been saved thanks to technologies developed to quality control welds that were later turned into medical scanners that could find bullets.
Feed and molly coddle cockroaches and your breed an infestation where the only cure will be to burn down the entire structure that they infest. Support Science and the dividends will be reaped for centuries.
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+1
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Later on the history books will be “corrected” like in Interstellar.
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