Gore Pushes for Private Investment in Space 181
dptalia writes "Al Gore said in a recent speech that more private enterprises need to invest in space. Gore pointed to the successful growth of the internet as proof that private investment is faster than government. Not surprisingly, Gore also lambasted President Bush's space policy."
First Post (Score:5, Insightful)
Me too! (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess is that this post will be just as effective as Gore in promoting investment.
I Mod Mr. Gore -1 Offtopic (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is Gore was speaking at an X-Prize function and the article is at space.com so they had to either spin some message about space out his drivel or write an article tearing him a new one for misuse of the speaking slot. Being good Democrats they opted for #1.
Yes space is good, private industry should, and is, working on the problems. Gore and government are no longer needed, and in fact only slow things down.
Re:Liberal vs. Conservative (Score:3, Insightful)
Ooops. Truth bites again.
Re:Space Case? (Score:5, Insightful)
Throwing more money at it won't fix the problem. We've spent hundreds of billions in new funds on top of what we were going to spend in the last 15 years and test scores are virtually unchanged. It is a social problem caused mostly by parents who don't care.
unemployment
What are we supposed to do, write everyone who gets fired a check for a million bucks? I know a LOT of people who've gotten fired and layed off and they wait until their benefits are about to run out before they start a serious crunch of a new job. Besides, we're at 4-5% unemployment, not 20%, there are MUCH bigger economic problems to worry about than that.
civil unrest
Yeah... everyone is rioting in the streets right now. There is always going to be a certain level of civil unhappiness, you can't eliminate it all without eliminating humanity.
disease
Cure every disease out there and watch another even nastier one creep up.
starvation
Generally not a major issue in the US. If you want the US to solve the starvation problems in the world, just let me know when you want to start overthrowing every 3rd world despot out there with our military. The problem isn't lack of food, it's lack of distribution.
international strife
See civil unrest... only there are very few bonds tying us together as an international community. There can never be perfect international harmony because somewhere out there, there will be at least one person who isn't happy and wants to lead a rebellion to overthrow it.
You have a low uid so I'm assuming you're not 15. I'm sorry that you still live in this happy little utopia where you get visted by Santa and the Tooth Fairy but the real world doesn't work the way you want it to and it never will. There will never be perfect harmony and happiness because each human is an individual with their own desires and viewpoint. With more than six billion people on the Earth, you're never going to get all of them to agreee on any single issue, much less the big picture.
Re:About Al... (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, at least he would've done one thing right!
There would be more investement in everything (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Liberal vs. Conservative (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, as a fiscal conservative, I happend to like having a budget surplus, smaller government, negative national debt accumulation and a reduced deficit in addition enjoying record economic growth and the the largest real and relative redistribution of wealth in recorded U.S. history. Far from perfect, but the 90s had things headed in the right direction, economically speaking.
That it all happened under the watch of a democrat should tell you all you need to know about the utility of political labels, as well as the fact that by any measure, this is the LEAST conservative administration in decades.
Re:Liberal vs. Conservative (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Liberal vs. Conservative (Score:3, Insightful)
Um - hello? How exactly is spending tax money "private investment"?
Re:First Post (Score:2, Insightful)
Nah. Private investment is remarkably unwilling to lose billions of dollars on things like space exploration. They will let the taxpayers spend their money until some commercial reason to go to space has been found. When it comes to high dollar investments with vague or unlikely returns, the private sector finds something else more important to spend its money on like perks for CEOs. The private sector would never have built the interstate highway system, supersonic air travel, or funded the first steps into space. The private sector left that groundwork for the government to do. People love to waffle on about the superiority of the private sector, but the private sector rides on the coattails of government time and time again. The public funds the fundamental research and the private sector reaps the profits- and hides them so that they don't return the investment to the taxpayers.
Re:Real Al Gore quote kiddies... (Score:5, Insightful)
I am detecting a pattern here though... Al Gore seems to find a good idea in progress, champion it, and (at least awkwardly) take some type of credit for it... in this case he is a bit behind the X-prize foundation [xprize.org] and NASA with its COTS Program [wikipedia.org] and Centennial Challenges [nasa.gov]. (I'll leave out his recent championing of Global Warming since he has a pretty well established environmental record)
Gore needs to pick sides (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Space Case? (Score:4, Insightful)
No. But the difference between the problem of getting men to Mars and the "problems" you mention -- and you could just as well have added the "problems" of the inevitability of death, taxes, and bad luck -- is that the former can actually be solved.
I think space exploration is a worthwhile endeavor, but AFTER we make life a little better for the next generation.
Some of us feel that space exploration is how we make life better for the next generation. We leave them a more exciting future, a new frontier to conquer, new adventures to motive them, and new technology to serve them. We tend to feel that throwing vast amounts of time and money down various rat-holes, by trying to "solve" insoluble problems that have been with us unchanged since the birth of Christ is much like the ancient Egyptians building enormous pyramids to please nonexistent gods -- a foolish and futile waste of our childrens' inheritance.
Re:First Post (Score:4, Insightful)
Private investors have been ponying up for space investments since the 60's - it's a myth of recent creation that such investment has only occurred with the X-prize and subsequently.
Re:Gore needs to pick sides (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Real Al Gore quote kiddies... (Score:4, Insightful)
Funding the early net? That is an oversimplification of the facts and history of his involvement. The process of privatizing and building a national information infrastructure requires all kinds of government involvement (understandably). It especially requires someone to champion the idea to other members of government.
All of the people involved with the evolution of the internet were important. Not just the Kahn and Cerf and the techies. It took a lot of people in a lot of different areas in order to evolve the way it did. It took Dennis Jennings and Steve Wolff at NSFNET (who helped NSFNET to make the decision on using TCP/IP and the infrastructure of DARPANET). It took a huge list of great contributors for it to come about as it did. In the realm of government (a crucial component to the NSFNET's policies and goals), it was Al Gore who was it's greatest contributor.
The "internet" of the 1980's was mostly a collection of regional, small "nets". Many of them were purpose built and were incompatible with one another. NSFNET decided to use TCP/IP in 1985 (many thanks to Dennis Jennings for championing its use!). In 1986 Steve Wolff took over NSF and immediately saw the need for a wide area networking infrastructure. They took on DARPANET's internet infrastructure to encourage interoperability and scalability. The NSF then encouraged its regional (initially academic) networks of the NSFNET to seek commercial, non-academic customers, expand their facilities to serve them, and exploit the resulting economies of scale to lower costs. However, use of their backbone was limited only to use "in support of Research and Education". This is why you saw so very many "*NET"'s (PSI, UUNET etc). In 1988, they initiated a bunch of conferences in which they worked out this plan to privatize and commercialize the internet.
The NRC produced a report commissioned by NSF titled "Towards a National Research Network" and presented it to Gore in 1988. This report had a profound effect on Gore, who took great interest in the subject and, became a champion of the cause.
In 1991, he promoted legislation that would provide $600M dollars for high performance computing and for the creation of the National Research and Education Network. The NREN brought together industry, academia and government in a joint effort to accelerate the development and deployment of gigabit/sec networking. Also brought about by the bill was the NII (National Information Infrastructure), i.e. the "information superhighway". As a side note, the bill also wound up funding the development of MOSAIC.
In 1992, we all got sick of the term "information superhighway" during the 1992 election season (perhaps foreshadowing another oft-repeated phrase used by Gore during the 2000 election season, "lock-box"
In 1993, Clinton and Gore submitted a report entitled "Technology for America's Economic Growth". Gore championed and expanded these ideas in speeches that he made at UCLA and to the Telecommunications Union in 1994. In addition, he "became the first U.S. vice president to hold a live interactive news conference on an international computer network".
Also in 1994, an NRC report, entitled "Realizing The Information Future: The Internet and Beyond" was released. This report, commissioned by NSF, was the document in which a blueprint for the evolution of the information superhighway was articulated and which has had a lasting affect on the way to think about its evolution. It anticipated the critical issues of intellectual property rights, ethics, pricing, education, architecture and regulation for the Internet.
In 1995, NSF's privatization policy culminated with the defunding of the NS
Re:Who is Al Gore? And why should we listen to him (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, these people also testified before the Senate...in which Al was a member of at the time. You can't tell me he did not use some of his political clout to give his wife's new special interest group...which sought to label, categorize lyrics as harmful and make it difficult to purchase (Bully,Grand Theft Auto anyone?).
Re:This is crazy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Gore needs to pick sides (Score:3, Insightful)
Nice! This is an excellently crafted little comment. I disagree with all your assertions but it really is a finely crafted attack.
Of course, you are wrong, and this is an obviously ingenuous attempt to discredit the man by making ridiculous statements. The reason that your statement is foolish is that developing space technology will allow us to move most of our industry offplanet - whether we will or not is of course up for debate. But just think about the environmental impact of mining and refining, or that of power generation. The first could be solved by doing asteroid mining and solar smelting; the second by building solar power farms in orbit and beaming the power back with microwaves. In fact we could eventually move our farming to orbital hydroponics.
All of this requires substantial and dramatic improvements to our utilization of space. Arguably we have the technology to do these things now but we're just not spending the money. Part of that is that it costs at least $5,000 per pound to orbit. You can't launch some big heavy mining rig at that price in a reasonable fashion; you need very heavy equipment to get started on any major operations in space. (You need a lot of heavy equipment to do anything major anywhere, but you only have to get it off the planet if you're working in space, naturally.)
Basically, you seem to be advocating not developing space technology. Is that really a good solution for the future?