Space junk forces astronauts into escape capsules on International Space Station:

It’s not bad enough that mankind has “literally littered” the entire planet we live on; now we have junked up outer space too.

Take a look at Mt. Everest and see what kind of condition the mountain climbers have left it in. It is almost like visiting a friend of yours and bringing a 55 gallon drum of garbage and dumping it their living room and leaving.

Now there is so much junk floating around in outer space that the astronauts had to take a quick exit for the space lab because they had some discarded trash that some space travelers either threw out the hatch or flushed down the toilet. It could get really messy out there.

According to astronomer Ben Burress of the Chabot Space and Science Center, there are millions of pieces of space junk floating in outer space. Much of it is man-made from more than 50 years of space travel.

I am the first one in favor of finding a cure for cancer or some other major breakthrough in medicine but who really cares if there was life on Mars 500,000 years ago. It isn’t doing us any good now.

Here is a breakdown of what the USA has spent on space exploration since they started in 1958:

Seen in the year-by-year breakdown listed below, the total amounts (in nominal dollars) that NASA has been budgeted from 1958 to 2011 amounts to $526.18 billion dollars—an average of $9.7 billion per year. By way of comparison, total spending over this period by the National Science Foundation was roughly one-fourth of NASA’s expenditures: $101.5 billion, or $2 billion a year.[2] NASA’s FY 2011 budget of $18.4 billion represents about 0.5% of the $3.4 trillion United States federal budget during the year, or about 35% of total spending on academic scientific research in the United States.[3]

According to the Office of Management and Budget and the Air Force Almanac, when measured in real terms (adjusted for inflation), the figure is $790.0 billion, or an average of $15.818 billion dollars per year over its fifty year history.

Yes, $ 9,700,000,000 a year. Do you think we could have put all the money to better use? May I add; I have never seen a government employee that was in a hurry to get anywhere; maybe except to the vending machine. A one week job usually takes them 9 months or better that is why so many of the government projects are outsourced.

No one can convince me that this kind of expense can justify its findings. Let’s spend that money here on earth and feed the hungry and get our house in order.

Like all other governmental endeavors, I am inclined to believe that there were a lot of cousins, uncles, brother, and father of the people in charge of the space program that made a space ship full of money over the years. It almost reminds me of what’s his name from Halliburton. I will give you a hint, the initials are D.C. and he wears glasses. Isn’t that a coincident?

These amounts are just what the USA spent and does not include any other countries that spent billions of Rubles to see if the Moon was really made of cheese. An old myth.

What have we come away with for all of that money and the lives lost; a few space rocks. Again; when the rock got back to earth it took a TEAM of scientists 2 years to examine the small boulder.

Does anyone really believe that someday there will be human beings from earth living on Mars or any other planet? Wake up.

Depending on where Mars and the Earth are in their respective orbits, they can be anywhere from 36 million miles to over 250 million miles apart.

At the closet proximity 250,000,000; traveling at 1,000 miles per hour it would take someone almost 29 years to reach Mars. If the people started out on the mission when they were 30 years old, they would be almost 60 years old by the time they got to Mars; that is everything went according to plan and never does.They will be too old to accomplish anything; that unless they made some babies on the way and the kids could do the work. But as everyone knows; it is very hard to find kids that want to work now a day here on Earth. Maybe they would be a little more aggressive out there but I doubt it.

Have you ever seen anything the government does turn out right? I will give them maybe 35% and those odds are not enough to get me on a space ship for 30 years with some Russian eating borscht and stinking up the cabin.

We have ample problems here on earth that we cannot take care of; so let’s keep our feet on the ground and give Mother Nature a little slack and quit dumping garbage in her heavens.

Play Moon River by Andy Williams – it will cheer you up

http://www.lyricsmode.com/lyrics/a/andy_williams/moon_river.html