What We Lost Because Of Government Welfare Programs

It is pretty clear that the American welfare state and "war on poverty" was a failure in every way but the one that mattered: it locked in voting blocs for the Democrats. But in all valuable measures--the number of people on welfare, poverty rates, the number of broken families, and overall economic well-being of the country--it has been a failure. NASA's space program was also a victim of the "war on poverty" with budgets cut because of demands from new social welfare programs. But I sometimes remind my kids of what we could have had if we hadn't been dumping money into the blue cities. And this excerpt from a Big Think article--"Why NASA should go all-in on nuclear propulsion"--is poignant reminder of what could have been:

    Viewed from orbit, Jackass Flats — situated in southern Nevada about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas — could easily be confused for Mars. The alluvial basin is full of tan and gray regolith, hued slightly red, and almost completely surrounded by carved, rocky hills. It was here, a half-century ago, that NASA engineers tested nuclear rockets intended to get us to the Red Planet by 1978.

    Officials had even grander hopes for the descendants of those rockets. They were planned to be mules for a permanent lunar base by 1981, propulsion systems for deep space probes to Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer planets, and engines for “space tugs” and shuttles ferrying payloads and people from low Earth orbit (LEO) to space stations around the Earth and the Moon. NASA even envisioned a “Grand Tour” of the Solar System propelled by nuclear rockets, taking advantage of a planetary alignment that happens every 174 years to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune with one sweeping mission between 1976 and 1980.

    Why didn’t this glorious space future come to pass? What went wrong? Well, nothing. Testing these rockets went astoundingly well, in fact.

 The rest of the article makes a case for prioritizing nuclear rockets, so if this is a topic that interests you, be sure to read the whole thing.

Related: "The Great Feminization" by Helen Andrews, Compact Magazine. A good article on the decline and collapse of our civilization. Oswald Spengler foresaw a century ago that feminism, as we call it, is one of the key precursors to civilizational collapse and this article gives a good explanation of why that is so.