Re: NASA gets SGI 2048-core Itanium 2 supercomputer

On Nov 29, 10:15 am, Neil Rieck <n.ri...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Nov 28, 5:00 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Neil Rieck wrote:
[...snip...]

That is NASA's current mission as given by the current president of the
USA. Retire Shuttle and build an Apollo system with the contractors that
used to do Shuttle with the hopes of going to the moon in 2020.

Not sure why you would consider it "nice" to go back 40 years in
technology and design.

I'm a person who prefers to view the world through the prism of
optimism so I would not want to go back to 1960. But those years were
very optimistic times and I remember seeing Werner von Braun on TV
saying that moon bases in the late 1970s would lead to a manned Mars
mission in the 1980s.

And if you think about it, that is where some US politicians took the
wrong path (which affected the whole planet). Any industrial economy
can only do one really big thing like "making war" or "having a space
program", not both. The US congress shut down the manned space program
to divert money to the Vietnam War effort but in the end, there was no
"Gulf of Tonkin" incident and the "domino theory" was just something
to justify the war. What is really weird is that defense contractors
would have been required to do a space program so they would benefit
either way, but a space program wouldn't have consumed all those human
lives.

Currently, the US is burning money in Iraq as history is repeating
itself (you can tell by the currency) while thousands of people are
dying unnecessarily (Sadam didn't have any WMDs; Sadam had nothing to
do with "911"). Meanwhile, Japan, India, and China have announced
unmanned lunar missions. China is currently in orbit around the moon
with hi-def cameras and other experiments. They intend to do an
unmanned soft-landing with a robotic rover in 2012 and a sample-return
mission in 2017.

While it is true that the US has plans for a manned landing between
2020 and 2024, I'm sure that the American congress will be making
tough choices shortly and this stuff will be delayed indefinitely.

NSR

I agree. After spending 15 months in Vietnam back in '68 - '69, I
often wonder why we were there in the first place, just like Iraq
today. What have we learned? Seems like nothing. I'd rather we
spent our dollars on seeing "what's out there", but this doesn't feed
the ever hungry war machine.

.

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