I've been reading all the articles on the current and future financial market bailout plans, and I really wish someone would realize that feeding money into these cesspool companies is not going to save America's economy. Corrupt companies will remain corrupt companies unless you remove the corruption from them, and some companies may be too far gone to save.
Personally, I really wish someone would adopt a plan to start investing in American manufacturing. Especially the space program. The best thing we could do would be to plow these huge sums of cash into American companies who MAKE things. Shifting money from pile A to pile B is not making anything. It's not growing anything.
If we took these billions of dollars and used them to make the greatest space program in the world once again, we could be employing all the people who BUILD things again, and as a bonus put engineering back on the map as an American speciality.
We would have to change some plans at NASA, especially the one that limits the manufacturing run for the new launch vehicles, and make sure we build a space program that plans to serious launch missions as often as needed to get real things done in space. Russia has never planned for the obsolescence of the Soyuz system. They've been basically using the same launch capsule and platform for 30 years. It's fantastically stable, and they pay $20 million per launch. We spend over a billion on each shuttle launch. That's just dumb.
