The New Mexico Space Technology Applications Research Group
(With apologies to LIS for the title of this post).
Neil Armstrong's famous step and giant leap for mankind was a great inspiration for a generation of potential future space travelers. For us, it was the end of a beginning. Others viewed the Apollo lunar landings as wasteful government spending on what was essentially nothing more than a publicity stunt. For them, instead, it was the beginning of the end. In the tug-of-war that typically defines national politics, the space program was decimated. Valuable science and engineering talent rotted on the vine. In many respects, it was a shameful period in US history.
Throughout this inglorious period of time, however, some visionaries tried to revive the ailing space program. These individualists seemed to settle on the same themes of earth orbit and lunar surface colonization, with the one unifying and recurring motif being the re-usability of space vehicles. But sometimes dreams fall in mid-flight; theirs certainly did. However, we, of the New Mexico STAR Group, have picked up the challenge. We can finish what these dreamers started!
What we discovered was a shocking truth: every one of these well-intentioned ideas for a space program consistently ignored one of the most important equations in all of rocketry: funding. Funding is what makes rockets fly; it is as important an equation as any Hohmann Transfer Orbit equation. To ignore this fundamental truth is to doom any space endeavor to never leaving the ground. No bucks, no Buck Rogers! It’s as true today as it was back then.
So what if there was a different way of doing business? And what does the solution to the funding equation look like?
This diary attempts to answer these questions. Our research will be substantiated and corroborated; it will be laid out step-by-step and in a logical manner. You do not have to be a rocket scientist anymore to understand the space business. And if you do happen to be a rocket scientist, then you will appreciate what we have done.
Continued below the Not-Quite-Red-Shifted DKos Elliptical Galaxy...
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