Over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Alex Roth has an op-ed piece that is simulteneously insightful and inane. It’s no mean trick to pull that off, but he manages to do so. He correctly identifies some of the problems with NASA:
The trouble is that the space program’s purposes are inseparable from its Cold War-era context.
…but immediately follows with this pointless slur:
The very concept of a “space station,” for example, is a 1952 brainchild of Nazi rocket scientist-turned-American-Cold Warrior Wernher von Braun, who was later caricatured as “Dr. Strangelove” in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Cold War satire film.

I enjoy a good rant as much as anyone (OK, probably more than most), and Roth has certainly written a stem-winder. Unfortunately getting a few small points right is not enough. The editorial is well written from a polemical standpoint, but it utterly destroys a strawman that nobody in either the alt.space or NASA communities believes.

It’s worth a few minutes just to familiarize yourself with his arguments, since they will be coming up again, and it’s good to know what the other side is saying.