Space

I drive around all day for a living. I find myself listening to a lot of talk radio. Everything but NPR is a screaming right wing nut talking about the liberal media. I’d like to know where they are!

There is one exception. In St. Louis we have a TV newsperson that does talk radio from 10:00 to noon with a different point of view. Charles Jaco on KTRS is a breath of fresh air as far as I’m concerned. I’ve actually found myself calling in.

A couple of days ago he was complaining about Obama cutting the manned space program. I called in to disagree with him.

Let me back up a little. First when people say we have more important things to spend our money on than NASA they’re not getting the picture. They seem to be under the impression that huge amounts of money are thrown at the program. The military spends more on toilet paper than NASA gets.

What I can’t believe gets missed is NASA’a payback. It’s permeated our whole society. Look at transistors, computers, laser technology and medicine. If I took the time to do a little research I could fill a book.

My disagreement with Charles was the very premise. Right now manned space exploration is bad science.

In a very rare case of Bush taking a lesson from history, in 2004 he announced an edict that NASA put a man on Mars. He was slipping in the polls and saw that Kennedy’s desire to see a man on the moon met with overwhelming public approval.

It became another one of Bush’s unfunded mandates. NASA needed between two hundred fifty billion and a trillion dollars to pull it off. Bush gave them one billion and walked away.

His total disregard for science has always been painfully evident.

We need to be focusing on robotics for exploration. We need to learn to generate oxygen and fuel on distant planets before we even think about going there. The logistics of keeping a human body alive would eat up exponentially more resources.

Bush is a perfect example of most people’s disregard for science and technology. If we are ever going to survive ourselves we have to start having a respect for science and education in general. The marching moron mentality is killing us!

I feel better now that I have that off my chest.

Oh, one more thing about calling the station. Charles was off the other day and Paul Harris took his place. Paul is decidedly more innocuous than Charles.

The big scandal in Missouri was the Budweiser bottler in Columbia sending expired beer to the local landfill. Two waste management employees took a company truck and made off with fifty cases of beer. They were caught by video surveillance. One of them resigned immediately and the other is expecting to be fired.

Paul was trying to figure out why they’d be fired for stealing garbage from a land fill, but what he really had a hard time understanding was the idea that beer expired.

My personal blog this week is about my skydiving experiences. I tried to call in to Paul with an anecdote based on an experience I had at a drop zone.

Budweiser bottled a millennium beer in a champing bottle for the year 2000. In the spring of 2001 we had a refrigerator at the airport full of them. I took several to a picnic. When they were opened the unmistakable odor of skunk filled the air, even though we were outdoors. They had turned into Heineken.

Beer does indeed expire. We drank them anyway.