^  I got it. Like you said If anythings harming the ozone it's the rockets getting shot up in it.  Never was interested in space travel.  No one can live up there and I'm not looking for ET.  There's too much here on Earth to do and discover. 

Right, it is a waste. Why do we need to know the moon, vital to life on Earth, is leaving Earth's orbit at a rate of
38 mm a year and will eventually spiral into space leaving the Earth a barren wasteland. We know this because lasers
are sent to the moon and reflected back by mirrors not placed there by astronauts.

It is those dang Rockets sent up that are punching holes in are precious ozone, not the millions of pounds of
space debris that pelts the Earth every day, nor is it those UFO's that constantly visit the Earth.

Why stop at Space, exploration serves absolutely no purpose at all and we have no need for science. It hasn't
benefited anyone so let's say it's all a waste and give that money to the poor.

If any of you watched that show "Life after Humans" the footprints on the moon would be the only trace that people inhabited the earth.Everything else would disappear!
Watch THIS!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4939078184096254535
Entire documentary :o :o :o :o :P

The weather will come satelites or not.Yes GPS for air plane navigation makes it easier for them now , but they still found their way even with out it.....It's funny how the "gases"that we use that are harm full to the Ozone have only been in use since the 50s & will take about 200 years to regroup up where the real harm can come.In the mean time NASA is studying the Ozone layer & Harming it every time it punches a rocket through it!


Risk is always relative.  If increased crop yields (due to GPS-assisted automated irrigation and planting equipment) can prevent 1000 starvation deaths per year, maybe the 10 skin cancer deaths per year (due to ozone layer degradation from the launches of the GPS constellations) are worth it. 

Likewise, if we hadn't had the earth-monitoring satellites in orbit (and the NASA high-altitude flights in the Antarctic), we might never have conclusively established that freon and other CFC-based refrigerants and propellants were directly responsible for the ozone degradation in the first place. 

Without NASA research, neither "side" (DuPont and its lobbyists vs. the people trying to answer the question of whether the observed ozone hole was a natural phenomenon or something caused by the presence of man-made contaminants) would have had enough data to deliver a knockout punch to the other, and the Montreal Protocols on CFCs would have been as ignored as the Kyoto Protocols on greenhouse gases.  We'd still be using freon, and not just in our mostly-sealed air conditioners and refrigerators, but we'd probably still be dumping it straight into the atmosphere via our aerosol cans for hairspray and paint.  Anyone not wearing 80+ sunblock in North America (to say nothing of every farmer in the edges of the temperate zones) would be having a Really Bad Day.

I'm plenty willing to criticize NASA where it deserves it -- the ISS and Shuttle are a classic boondoggle; the ISS doesn't do any real science, and the Shuttle exists solely to service the ISS.  Unmanned boosters are by far the better way to launch cargo to earth orbit, and that includes ISS components.  Man-rated space vehichles are still bloody expensive, and while I personally like the idea of a manned Mars mission, and while it's possible to do it with today's technology, you could do a hell of a lot more science (for a tenth of the price) over the next 20 years by shelving the project and launching a small fleet of probes to every planet in the solar system.

We'll have to agree to disagree on this -- even if you regard it as little more than welfare for engineers, NASA ends up producing a net economic benefit.  I like bombs, but I'd rather pay an engineer $100K/year to build robots and space probes than pay him $100K/year to build bombs.  And if someone's capable of doing engineering but about to go on the dole, then even as a taxpayer I'd rather pay him $100K/year to do engineering than pay him $20K/year to do nothing.  He might do something cool with his education at NASA.  If he sits on his butt all day drinkin' beer and eatin' cheetos (I have a pretty good private sector job and my keyboard's still orange, and I can only imagine how lazy I'd be if I didn't have to work for a living :), he invents nothing, and even though he costs the taxpayers less than he would at NASA, he's guaranteed to provide a zero return on that investment.  A mind is a terrible thing to waste.


In The End It Boils Down To This!


In the end, it boils down to the fact that the dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a space programme.

We'll have to agree to disagree on that too.

"dinosaurs are extinct because they didn't have a space programme."

According to Robot Chicken They did! ;D