Mark Whittington has further (uncharitable) thoughts about the late Senator Proxmire. It's a harsher obituary than I'd write, particularly seeing as the body has barely cooled off, but then, I've never been as enamored of large federal space budgets (particularly considering how ineffectively they've been spent, for the most part) as he is.

The poor man died a slow death as his mind faded. It is sad regardless of what he used to do for a living.

But no - Whittington can't wait and dumps his own self-absorbed space notions on the poor man's unburied corpse.

What a sicko.

Ever wonder why people in the real world pay little attention to space weenies?

You guys need to get a life.

Ask a Boing employee from the 70's if they remember Proxmire. Boing used to provide bus service to their Seattle employees, in their parking lot. After Proxmire, they could land a 747 in that same parking lot. Boing has recovered since then of course, but I still remember the billboard on south I-5 asking that the last person to leave Seattle, please turn out the lights.

I didn't know he had alzheimers, something I wouldn't wish on anybody or their family (it affects my family too.)

But the entire article seems to agree with my memory of the Senator. It seems pretty accurate.

What's really too bad is that all Senators don't stop spending the peoples money without consent.

Hypocracy is not limited to just the one Senator.

Boeing?

After Proxmire, they could land a 747 in that same parking lot

Gee, how did Proxmire do that? By helping kill the SST? That was a slam dunk good move on his part. It made no sense economically -- but you could have figured that out from the way Boeing wasn't going to fund it itself.

More generally, why exactly are Boeing employees entitled to my tax dollars? In the privately funded sector, employees in firms that lose their economic justification can expect to lose to their jobs. It's how the economy redeploys resources.

I can see that I'm the target of one of Keith's little hyperboles. For the record, I would not wish Proxmire's mode of death on anyone. But the way he died does not wipe out the evil he wrought nor his rather sordid political record. In any case, I think I needed to balance out some of the fawning obits that casted the man as some kind of champion against "government waste." He wasn't anything of the sort. It was just an issue for him to use to promote himself. If Keith thinks that makes me a "sicko", then he's welcome to his opinion.

Boeing?
Boing?

Depends on the pilot from my experience...

Mark,

By balance, do you mean the fact that you spent 1 line on Tookie Williams and several paragraphs on Senator Proxmire? At least you got a chance to vent some of that hate.

I'm a little puzzled by Leland's comment. Tookie Williams was a criminal who at last paid for his crimes. Proxmire was a Senator whose policies wrecked a great deal of damage. One has not anything to do with the other.

"More generally, why exactly are Boeing employees entitled to my tax dollars?"

Because they were building the weapons systems that were keeping your ungrateful a*s free?

Because they were building the weapons systems that were keeping your ungrateful a*s free?

And they were paid for that. Why are they then entitled to spending merely for the sake of spending, as the SST would have been, and STS was?

Perhaps you are of the opinion that once someone works on a weapons system, they should have guaranteed employment for the rest of their life? I guess in this view defense contractors are somehow more worthy than all those people who work in the purely private sector and don't have this kind of tenure.

BTW: in the employment downturn at Boeing in the early 1970s, the SST cancellation played only a minor role. 7,500 layoffs came from that; the other 53,000 were from a combination of a large reduction in commercial jet orders and the tailing off of defense acquisition spending as Vietnam began to wind down.

Because they were building the weapons systems that were keeping your ungrateful a*s free?

I hope you aren't confusing the rent-seeking behavior with legitimate business. The US has steadily undermined its military capabilities by permiting companies like Boeing to monopolize aspects of the security of the US. Yes, I'm ungrateful.

Mark,

I don't see any impetus for change coming from a different political lineup. NASA has naturally evolved to deliver political pork barrel to a large number of congressional districts. That more than anything explains its failure in manned space and elsewhere. If there is to be public funding of space exploration, then it should have some credible, measurable impact on the US's activity and presence in space.

Ultimately, the US is an economic power. NASA never did much to assist the US in developing an economic presence in space. You can blame Proxmire and similar politicians for this, but I think the blame would be very misplaced.

Even if we buy into the Chinese threat, I don't see how NASA will help us thwart a Chinese takeover of space. It has been subverted, and IMHO never was a good approach in the first place.