Because they won't fight back...

[bluesdave]

tw: Bluesdave - you clearly are young.

I rest my case. As I said, tw never reads carefully, other people's posts. I would have thought that when I said that I listened to JFK's famous speech in 1961, and watched Neil Armstrong live on TV in 1969, that it was obvious that I could not possibly be young (I know that you know this is true, and that you are using those words as an insult). You think it is quite OK to say that you are urinating on my Bible, yet you feel insulted when I call you a bigmouth. I said right at the beginning that I agreed with some of the things you said - ie. the use of robots, and all I did was try to point out that science is always at the mercy of politics, and that at least some good has come from the space programme. If you choose to ignore NASA's own documentation, then that says more about you than it does about me.

BTW, I never said that Bush's Moon base was a great idea, or that the ISS was either. I think that a small base on the Moon does make some sense, and at the time NASA was pushed to build the ISS there were many people at NASA who argued against the expense, saying that they could build a Moon base for less money, and do more robotic/automated research. Politics *did* override logic, but that does not mean that "man" has not benefited from the tools and materials that NASA has developed. You would have us throw this all away, just out of sheer petulance.

As a researcher, I have had to deal with political pressure on budgets. I understand from first hand experience how difficult it is to carry on research while keeping your political overlords happy. My background *is* in science. What's yours?