Space: The Spineless Frontier

I've just about had it with NASA and JPL.  These (pejorative) geniuses couldn't find their ass with both hands!

These bozos have literally stumbled over aliens to go look at...ROCKS!

Here's the story:
For at least 200 years, people with telescopes have been watching the polar ice caps on Mars grow and recede with the seasons.  For at least 100 years, water clouds have been observed in Mars' atmosphere.  Since the 70s, we've had photos of water channels, snow and possible ancient ocean shorelines.  Since the 90s we've had photos of lakes, ponds, geysers, and seeps.  In the past few years, their little dune buggies and gotten mired in the mud more than once.  A couple of years ago, Phoenix landed near the north pole of Mars and found all kinds of ice in the dirt.

And these freakin' idiots are still spending billions of dollars to send bigger dune buggies to look for 'evidence' of water on Mars?

Here I thought these guys and gals had degrees in exo-this and planetary-that, but from what I see, they could be standing in flood waters in a torrential downpour in eye-sight of an ocean and still couldn't find water.

The Viking landers found strong evidence of metabolism with a circadian rhythm in Mars' soil.  A lot of smart people, including Arthur C. Clark (who conceived of geo-synchronous communication satellites) have seen trees, pond scum, and lichen.  Some folks with a lot of credentials and letters after their names have put up a strong case for past civilizations on Mars, including Tom Van Flandern, who was the head of the US Naval Observatory.  Tell me he's a kook, would'ja?

Yet, the mental midgets at JPL sent Phoenix to 'look for signs of life' without any equipment to test for life.  Just pick up more rocks and take pretty pictures of them.

These putz' couldn't find life on New Year's Eve in Times Square.

Are they REALLY this stupid, or is there another agenda?  I mean, after all, how much evidence do you need before you can say, "Hey, look!  There's water!"

Like any 'scientific' organization, NASA and JPL get money through grants.  The grants come from individuals and organizations with agendas.  Those agendas influence the scope and use of the grant money.  JPL's charter is to hunt for rocks.  Thus, everything they do will be hunting for rocks.  NASA's charter says they are to look for evidence of life off of the Earth, but it goes on to say that it is under the control of the military and they can't tell anyone if they find that evidence.

So, hey!  Let's give them more money to go find life on other planets!  After all, together they will look in the wrong places, and if they find it, they won't tell us!

If this isn't the classic definition of a circle jerk, I don't know what is.  If the CONgress is serious (hahaha!) about saving money, they can start by whacking NASA and JPL off of the public teat.  Let 'em fend for themselves.  After all, how long do you think these guys would get private money if they kept sending the wrong tools to do the job and then were prohibited from sharing any really good info, if they found it?

So, now they've got a new toy.  It's a car-sized, nuke-powered dune buggy that weighs a couple of tons that they're going to drop in the middle of what amounts to the Gobi desert to look for signs of 'past water.'  The reasoning behind choosing such an arid location is that the buggy might get stuck in the mud if they sent it somewhere where there's ample water.  Bet you think I'm kidding, don't you.  Look it up.

They want to look for water in a dry hole.  They want to check for signs of life without any instruments to do it effectively.  And they want to take lots of pretty pictures with wildly expensive cameras that can't produce a simple image with correct colors.  Hell, my cell phone could do better for a lot less.

With all the billions and billions of dollars that have been spent since the 60s, we've landed 12 men on the Moon.  That's it.  Other than that, we've put lots of whirly-gigs in orbit that go round-and-round-and-round.

The US has a manned space program that can't put a man in space.  It has a shiny space station with no where to go that is supposed to do zero-G research, but every time the positioning rockets fire, that all goes to hell.  The world has tons of pretty pictures of rocks and dirt taken by robots.  And we're blessed with Tang orange drink and velcro.  Furthermore, in 60 years of technological development, we still use controlled explosions at the butt end of ballistic missiles to launch stuff into the endless go-round.

Jell, Burt Ruttan can build a REAL spacecraft in his garage, and NASA can't?  The Chinese invented rockets 800 years ago, and we can't do just slightly better for all the R&D?

Tell me again...what precisely have we paid for?  I mean, we're going to all this effort to explore strange, new worlds, and then going out of our way not to talk about the 'strange' bits.  WTF?

Here we've got pretty strong evidence of really unusual features on the Moon, so we stopped going there.  There's unbiased, computer-based analysis that shows there's a better than average chance of buildings on Mars, so we poo-poo anyone who says so.  There's a moon of Mars that even Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon, says is really, really interesting.  So we ignore it.  There's a moon of Jupiter with possible oceans underneath its crust.  So we go back to sleep.  There's a moon of Saturn that is a dodecahedron with a massive seam precisely on it equator that no one can explain, so let's go look at something else.  There's another moon of Saturn that has methane clouds and ethane oceans, but we still say Earth's oil comes from rotten dinosaurs.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again, expecting different results.  By that definition, NASA and JPL are certifiably nuts, and anyone who keeps funding them is crazier still.

If we had taken all the money, time and effort wasted on going in circles around the Earth, and had pointed it in one direction, say at Mars, there'd be a bustling civilization there with interplanetary trade going on.

Basically, what we've achieved so far is akin to Columbus sailing in circles around the Mediterranean for 60 years, expounding the virtues of far off lands and exciting trade prospects.  Meanwhile, he's got robots in Central America sending back photos of Mayan cities and massive gold deposits and telling everyone that's not what they show.  Oh, and can he have another couple billion to send more robots to show the same damn pictures from different angles...or 3-D..or infrared...or ultraviolet?

It's like Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe painting.  Four identical panels, different colors.

Cape deh!

Cost cutting idea: get rid of the yutzes at NASA and JPL.  China and India got the exploration thing covered. Use the money to pay down the national debt.  You're not really putting scientists out of work, because they don't meet the definition of a scientist.  A scientist wants to discover new things, but these crack-pots put more effort into looking the other way, than in actually dong something useful.  We've got enough pictures.  Let some real researchers and explorers take over from here.

The new Mars dune buggy is called Curiosity, which is an apt name.  After all, it's a curiosity why people put up with their crap and don't demand actual results for all the billions spent.  The more money poured in, the more backwards it goes.

Send 'em all back to their Masonic lodges and Satanic temples, and let real men take over.

Let's have a little Final Frontier for a change!