From The Register, quoting Neil Armstrong:
For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.
Unfortunately Mr. Armstrong, this will be just another of many such indignities I predict. This was preceded by the rot of our manufacturing ability and political system, and will probably be followed quickly by our health care and (what’s left of) our education systems, and ending with a post-Soviet style rapid decay of our military. Maybe not, but we are flat friggin’ broke and have been for years, and only a money printing binge by the Fed and a debt explosion at every level of government has papered it over.
It was like when Kid Sandmich asked me about how bad it was that Obama was getting rid of so many of our nukes, to which I said the number of nukes we’d like to have is more than what he would leave us with, but the number that we can actually afford is dramatically lower.
