@Tfmonkey The crazy thing is, half a century ago back in the mid-70's the same Engineers that sent men to the moon built the most badass hypersonic missile system to intercept incoming soviet ICBM's. It was called the SPRINT system and it reached Mach 10 in 5 seconds from launch. It was deployed for two years and then cancelled and mothballed. All domain expertise is gone, the blueprints are lost, all the men that built it are dead. America decided welfare for shaniqua was more important.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=16MMZJlp_0Y
I'd go to the moon, but we don't have that technology anymore - NASA Astronaut Don Pettit
The Earth Question
Youtube
See the titanic submarine.
We should not spend any government money on research for anything, that is how you create "science" cults with fake data to keep getting new funding where the IRS holds people at gunpoint instead of real science
We should focus on how to do science and invent things to help humans on earth
If we can not solve basic problems on earth then we should not infect outer space with stupidity
It is more dangerous not to maintain nuclear power plants because then you still have to guard nuclear waste but now it is stored in a less safe manner
Building nuclear power plants is the safest thing to do with unused nuclear material that must be guarded for environmental reasons and to prevent terrorism
@Marakus @shortstories @Tfmonkey @Engineer There's an important distinction between "unable to" vs "unwilling to" maintain infrastructure. We still have competent people, but the govt regularly chooses to hire incompetent groids instead.
The logical end result of this is a recession of infrastructure to locations predominantly occupied by competent people. We're still going to have nuclear plants in, say, Montana and North Dakota for a while before they're overrun. At that point, said people are going to go overseas for employment, but that doesn't mean they won't return if the US ends up course correcting.
Just like with SF and Xi, the US govt could choose to reverse decisions overnight, but they make a conscious decision to collapse the system. womp womp
@Tfmonkey They weren't a bluff, there's multiple videos of them in operation, both high speed and real-time. The real problem is all the diversity in STEM (now its STEAM, the A is for Art). The reason they were mothballed is because the introduction of MIRV made them obsolete, each SPRINT missile only had a roughly 35% chance of successfully intercepting the ICBM. But we can't even make a hypersonic missile of ANY type today. America doesn't do science anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZZV464z9g8&ab_channel=jaglavaksoldier
@Engineer What if those missiles were a bluff and didn't actually work, and were propaganda and that's why the US couldn't replicate their mid-70s technology.