In about 2 days we plan to launch 4 people towards the moon. It is kind of mind boggling how screwed up NASA became in just 40 years. Imagine what went horribly wrong time after time in the War Department, Department of the Navy, Bureau of Indian Affairs and other agencies that have been around much longer than NASA. It's a wonder that we survive.
As far as I can tell, we haven't seen a single piece of successful space hardware other than the folks at SpaceX and they only got to where they are now by experimenting to destruction with every single iteration of their hardware. The NASA astronauts are launching on a rocket like no other built in the world after several failures of some extraordinarily simple things that real rocket designers and operators would have ironed out decades ago. Oh, that's right, they did that 60 years ago and then they got sucked into the full blown decline of NASA.
Speaking of planning, 5 days from now is probably right about the time that lights go out in New Zealand and perhaps much of Australia. It seems nobody ever thought it might be a good idea to build in some extraordinary resilience into their national energy planning and supplies and maybe stockpile a lot of fuel for emergency use like, for instance, the oil stops coming.
Silly bears.
On the gripping hand, it is never as dire as people want you to think.
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