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Damn! The Dawn mission, which was going to launch this summer, has been put off by NASA and may be completely scrubbed, despite the fact the spacecraft has been built and is ready to fly.

This really torques me because this mission was going to do something really interesting...it was going to fly out to the asteroid belt, orbit one asteroid for six months, then jet off to orbit another. The two target asteroids are the largest in the belt and very interesting. Vesta appeasrs to have basaltic rocks covering its surface, an anamoly because while it is big for a planetesimal, it is considered to be too small to have experienced heating to the extent it formed layers of differentiated mineral composition like Earth. Ceres is the largest asteroid in the solar system and does not seem to have experienced the same formation procceses like Vesta...but it does appear to have an atmosphere, something quite unexpected and anamolous.

Well shit. Okay I'm an asteroid nut, but, it's amazing that NASA blows the equivalent of a small nations's GDP with every shuttle launch, but can't scrounge a few mil for a truly worthwhile mission. No wonder they have lost the public's interest in Space...

Space is all well and good but I propose we blow off the next 10 shuttle missions and pay for the border wall. I don't care about the space station but I do care about the borders. I wonder how many other people feel as I do?

Maybe they can throw bowling balls out the window at border jumpers.

What happened to the Pluto mission?  I heard something about a pluto mission on the radio the other day.

Quoted: Space is all well and good but I propose we blow off the next 10 shuttle missions and pay for the border wall. I don't care about the space station but I do care about the borders. I wonder how many other people feel as I do?

Agreed. Other than satellites for communication and navigation, it's a tremendous waste of money and resources (and, no I don't subscribe to the spin-off technology theory either).

The New Horizon mission launced last week but will not get to Pluto for 10 years.

Pluto is not a planet by the way. It is merely a lagre Kuiper Belt object.

Quoted: (and, no I don't subscribe to the spin-off technology theory either).

That's just idiotic. Economic spinoff from the Moon missions is estimated to be from 10-70X

Quoted: Space is all well and good but I propose we blow off the next 10 shuttle missions and pay for the border wall. I don't care about the space station but I do care about the borders. I wonder how many other people feel as I do?

So, you are going to let a bunch of pathetic mexican fencejumpers shitcan our national scientific progress?

If people like you made policy...why, we wouldn't be having this discussion because the internet would not exist. No wait, we could write letters to each other with response times of weeks. But we'd be doing it in Russian, because without our technical lead we would have lost the Cold War.

Go back to your beer and ball games on TV and let the adults handle the future please.