It doesn't take a rocket scientist to...

Hey folks,

You may have recently heard that NASA will no longer send shuttles to space. I wish I could say I was a bit saddened but I can’t. I was extremely happy. Somehow this portal of outrageous expenditures is still in the news, so I have decided to do a post on it. Now, for starters I am not in total opposition to space exploration. Now we all know of my burning patriotism, if you have doubts please read my “combatting communism" post, thus I fully support the program that was solely invented to show the Russians we could flex our muscle (and our spending) more than them. Indeed this is the government program that was encouraged because it was “hard” and Americans do hard things. I always presumed that people who worked at NASA were intelligent. I remember the phrase “it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to…” obviously inferring that a rocket scientist, aka a NASA worker, is smart.  But I am questioning this presumption after doing a small amount of research on one particular mission. The mission I am going to talk about is the mission of trying to find out if there is water on mars. Now, the question is not that dumb, however the measures exhausted to answer the question are unreasonably stupid. For starters let’s look at a picture of mars.

 Now I am no genius but from looking at this picture it doesn’t exactly look like the Amazon. So NASA decided to send some robots there to answer this question. Again, their purpose was to learn if there was or is water on mars. They want to learn this because water = life (sometimes). So they sent two robots to do some exploring on mars. In total the mission, this single solitary question cost just under a billion dollars to answer. They say that water has been on mars and life was possibly there. What?! They spend a billion dollars and there are no definite answers? They are still saying there might have been life on mars. Well we knew that before and it doesn’t take a billion dollars for someone to tell you a maybe. Hey NASA, there might be life on Jupiter, if you pay a billion dollars I will tell you again that there might be life on Jupiter. They pay a billion dollars and are no less conclusive in their results. It does not take a rocket scientist to tell you that’s a bad idea. Oh wait, it just might.

So while these intellects are bawled up in their space fantasies of interplanetary relations and who knows what else there is actually another crisis going on. So, NASA answer me these questions: is there life in Ethiopia? Is there water in Ethiopia? I actually don’t need NASA to tell me. There is life on Ethiopia however there is practically no water. So here we have these people with IQ’s of 140-200 spending their time wondering about water on a place where there is no human life and mean while there are drastic water shortages for entire countries with populations that are, well, higher than that of Mars. Oh and with a billion dollars you could purchase almost one million airplane tickets to Ethiopia to help this country. Or you could increase the country’s GDP by nearly 10 percent.

So maybe it does take a rocket scientist to spend a billion dollars (1/3 of Ethiopia’s GDP the year the robots were launched) to end up with a maybe.

Who do I hold responsible?

I figure I have to blame someone, so I have chosen NASA’s director of space operations pictured above. I would have a perma-frown too i.f I knew that the money I wasted could have been used to help thirsty Africans. Oh, and the mustache is not helping your case much. 

Yours untruly, cause I am my own

Benjamin Williams