Frazz by Jef Mallett for May 20, 2013

@ Nab Some of us made do with Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clark. It’s fun to read those oldies now and compare the things their authors imagined with things that actually have come about.

But I mean that in a nice way….

If you are going to blame someone for the demise of the space program, it’s the Democrats not the Republicans.I belong to the National Space Society, and in their magazine they had a history of Congressional votes for the space program since NASA’s conception. And every one was right down party lines with Democrats against space program funding and Republicans for.

Since you started it…

It’s amazing how the left wing liberal environmentalists have stopped any new nuclear power plants from being developed, then make this absurd statement.

My father came back from WW2 and went to Oak Ridge to work on nuclear propulsion for aircraft in 1945. Back then they scrapped the idea because the design requirement weighed too much – or so I was told.

Actually, the nuclear-propelled bombers weren’t even that promising as weapons. The big problem is that they can’t do anything that ICBMs can’t do faster and more reliably.

And opposition to nuclear power is, sadly, bipartisan (one of the few things nowadays that is). Liberals oppose new plants due to misguided environmentalism, and conservatives oppose them due to misguided fears of terrorist action.

@ashburm,Didn’t it only put the space program out of action for a few years? I seem to remember it recovered fairly quickly once they figured out the problem.

Sorry, didn’t mean to post twice!

Read “The Space Shuttle Decision,” the Smithsonian’s excellent book of history, and you will see how the Nixon administration took NASA’s plan for a real (fully reusable) shuttle, space station, heavy lift booster, nuclear interplanetary stage and Mars landing in the mid-80s, and whittled and bled it down until there was just a shuttle (seriously compromised by budget constraints and a mission greatly expanded by a DoD requirement that it serve as a manned spy satellite)… with no place to go.

You sound like do-nothing Washington politicians. Wasting time tossing around blame for what took place in the past. What are YOU doing RIGHT NOW to make things better? Blame accomplishes nothing. Write, call or email your Congressperson.

If you are being sarcastic, you are funny!

If you actually believe what you said, you are an idiot.

The ‘right wing’ is trying to take us BACK to the great country we used to be. The left wing is trying to take us into communism or socialism. Period.

I think Jef must have just discovered Neil deGrasse Tyson. Maybe he watched the commencment address at Rice University:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1×6ymwJHYSk

LOL. Somebody watches too much Fox news….

gack. I thought dropping Prickly City would insulate me from the ignorant politics….

How much would you pay for the Universe?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbIZU8cQWXc

Night-Gaunt49: The great “non-event” at Three Mile Island used up 90% of the allowable claims before it hit the Price-Anderson limit. Adjusted for inflation, today it would go way past it and the rest of the claimants would be out of luck. Corporate energy can always get legal relief. Even the funds for “green energy” go almost exclusively to large scale systems which will preserve the utility monopolies’ control over us, rather than the human-scale systems which would allow individuals and neighborhoods to do things for themselves rather than be forced to depend on big corporations or big government to do it for them.