Today’s moment of introspection came this morning. After some time spent updating my twitter feeds and answering emails, followed by my regular commute (where I forgot to pick up my prescriptions, doh!), I realized something:

I don’t think I am a hacker.

I used to think that I was. Back in the early 1980s, I was living in Oregon, first in the Portland area, and later in Eugene as I entered the University of Oregon as an undergraduate in their CIS department. While it had a respectable program, it wasn’t particularly innovative. I took my first official class (CIS 201) which used Apple IIs running a Pascal like language called Karel, which was meant to teach you programming by directing a little synthetic robot around a grid. It was staggeringly easy (by that time, I had been programming microcomputers for about 4 years). The instructor decided that he’d give us all the assignments for the class on the first day. I completed them by the third day (could have done it in one day, but limited lab times) which freed up a substantial block of time for me to wander around, trying to find other machines I could use, reading books and magazines in the computer reading room, and generally pursuing my own interests. I took lots of dreadfully boring classes as well: on FORTRAN and COBOL (yes, I’ve taken a COBOL class) using their DEC 1091 and their IBM 4341. By midway through my sophomore year, I had exhausted the undergraduate program of anything remotely interesting, and decided on the spur of the moment to enroll in a class on compilers, taught by Professor Ginnie Lo. I had an ulterior motive: taking that class would give me access to the departments VAX 11/750, which was running Unix, about which I had heard a great deal, but had no practical experience at all. The first day, she was calling roll and came to my name. I raised my hand, and she looked at me and said “Did I give you my permission to take this class?” to which I replied truthfully “no”. To her credit, she merely went back to calling roll. I learned a lot about compilers and Unix. I developed a bit of an obsession with computer languages. I learned to program in C. I found a small number of others who shared our fascination, and we rapidly became friends and room mates. It was a great time for me intellectually, even though I was struggling with three jobs and a full class load.

Ah, back to the hacker thing….

One thing was obvious: I seemed to be different than the majority of other students. Outside of our inner circle of over-achievers, we saw lots of people who were good solid students, but which seemed to lack the inner passions that we felt, the nearly maniacal obsession to understand how we could use these machines to achieve new things. We craved access to computers, and spent a lot of our time trying to find ways to gain access to hidden computing resources, or resources that were reserved for a select few.

Amidst this, I read Steven Levy’s book “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution”. And I finally had a name for what it was we were.

Levy espoused a hacker ethic, which I’ll reproduce here from the Wikipedia page on his book:

• Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total.
• Always yield to the Hands-on Imperative!
• All information should be free
• Mistrust authority—promote decentralization.
• Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race or position.
• You can create art and beauty on a computer.
• Computers can change your life for the better.

It’s hard to say how transformative this book was for me. I had stumbled into some of these principles more or less on my own, but now I had a name for them, and some inkling that other people were doing the same thing in exciting places elsewhere in the world. Until then, I had mostly thought that the path to success in school was to do well in my classes. While I enjoyed the extra-curricular work I did, I never saw it as anything more than a distraction. But post-Levy, I understood that my extra-curricular activities were actually the important stuff and that there was no reason to postpone doing the interesting stuff. My friends and I wrote programs, both together and as singular endeavors. We shared code and experience, and we got better. I became interested in computer graphics, and started writing ray tracing programs. I used USENET to make contact with other people interested in ray tracing, and we shared information and built on each others experience. It was awesome.

So, why don’t I think I’m a hacker?

Up until a few years ago, many self-identified “true” (in the Levy sense) hackers were irritated that the press used the term to indicate those who break into computers or computer networks. This is no doubt in no small part because of the antics of Kevin Mitnick, who was perhaps the first computer criminal to reach the attention of the general public. While some were certainly interested in computer security, it was (I suspect) initially mostly to gain access to computing resources and to measure their extent, not to commit crimes or fraud. Most of those “hackers” were actually posers whose skills were commonly fairly mundane and uninteresting. Years later, we’d have the term “script kiddie”, which is an accurate portrayal of 99% of all “hackers” of this sort.

I’m not one of those.

But in the last few years, we’ve seen another use of the term: exemplified perhaps most clearly in my head by Paul Graham. While Graham has made some interesting technical contributions, he’s widely known now as an essayist and as a venture capitalist heading Y Combinator which specializes largely funding web based startups. As a result, it has become somewhat fashionable to use the term “hacker” as synonymous with “any programmer who is working in the web space, especially on social networks, and especially in start ups”. I’m not actually a fan of his essays. Most of what he says that I think is true were said better by people like Brooks, and most of the rest I think is self-serving egotism.

I’m not like him either. Sadly, that means I’m not as wealthy either.

For me, my hacking is the internal struggle to make my brain a more interesting place to spend my life. I am interested in lots of stuff, and it turns out that a computer allows me to explore these things. In almost every case it is “boldly going where others (usually smarter) have gone before”, but the effort of actually examining the details is pleasing to me.

As an example, I have a directory on my computer which I call “play”. I use it to store most of the trivial and not so trivial programs that I enjoy writing. It’s got about 300 directories in it now (not all are code that I’ve written, some of it is code from others that I’ve found inspiring). It includes things like the original raytracer I wrote in 1986, which I occasionally still hack on, and its successor that I wrote a few years ago during the week between Christmas and New Years, and which hopefully integrates some of what I’ve learned since 1986. I’ve got a program that I wrote to count all the primes to 10**12 or one that implements bignum arithmetic using the Fast Fourier Transform. I’ve written and blogged about my checkers program Milhouse. I’ve written a library in Python for computing the location of Earth orbiting satellites. I’ve written a PDP-1 emulator to play Spacewar! I have written a small compiler that takes in scripts and outputs randomized test sessions to learn Morse code by using speech synthesis. I’ve written several simulators for the Enigma machine, including one that runs on the Atari 2600 video game. Fractal image compression. Volume rendering. Stuff that draws wireframes of globes. Extracts nice 256 entry color maps from photos. Sends and receives slow scan television. Finds and downloads tagged images on Flickr. Aligns frames from my video of Mercury transiting the surface of the sun. Computes the Ronchi pattern for testing telescope mirrors. Computes the diffraction pattern for off-axis parabolic reflectors. And dozens more.

I used to think that made me a hacker.

Perhaps the better word would be “crazy”.

Honestly folks, I don’t get it.

A lot of people think that a recall of iPhones will be inevitable now, because (to their way of thinking) Apple shipped a phone with a known defect.

I’m wondering what phones they’ve been buying up until now: these defect-free phones from those manufacturers who are so careful that they only release absolutely rock solid equipment to the consumers. If you were satisfied with your previous phone and its freedom from defects, then why did you bother switching to the iPhone at all?

“My god, it could drop calls!” It’s a cell phone. We’ve accepted crappy performance from them for years, sometimes caused by cell phone deficiencies, sometimes caused by network deficiencies, and yet we continue to pay our bills.

“I’m annoyed that I have to buy a case for my iPhone.” I bought one for my first iPhone, because it was so slippery I kept juggling it out of my pockets. I delayed getting one for my second iPhone, with the net result that I put a scratch in the front bezel two weeks in. I didn’t call that a “design flaw” and ask for a recall: I bought a case. Get over it.

I’m not really that much of an Apple fan boy, I just think that the Apple iPhone remains significantly (at least for me) than anything else on the market when taken as a whole. If you like your EVO better, then fine, I won’t whine when it drops your call after using it for just five hours and its battery runs out. I also won’t file a class action lawsuit about it.

It’s good to see that 16 year old Abby Sunderland has been rescued by a French fishing vessel. She was attempting to set a world record by sailing around the world solo.

A lot of people have been commenting about how reckless, negligent, etc.. her parents were for letting someone so young attempt such a dangerous voyage. The claim is that a sixteen year old is simply incapable of comprehending the risks and the dangers involved.

I understand this concern, but I don’t share it.

Our society has become incapable of understanding risks. We tolerate the thousands who die in automobile accidents, yet when one person tries (and fails) to put a bomb in their shoes, forever after we all are forced to take off our shoes at airports. We let kids drive at 16, but they can’t vote until their are 18, and we mostly hold off drinking until age 21. And at each age, there are kids who take these new possibilities and handle then responsibly, and there are those who never become responsible at any age.

Abby comes from a family full of experienced sailors. Her brother made a similar journey at age 17. While I do not fully comprehend the compulsion that would cause someone to embark upon such an adventure, neither is it completely mystifying to me. Such a endeavor cannot help but be profoundly empowering, pushing one’s self to the limits of their endurance, resourcefulness and skill.

I’m perfectly willing to accept that Abby and her parents are better judges of what she is capable of doing than we are. By all accounts, she was well equipped, well trained, and if you take the time to read her blog, emotionally mature enough to handle a journey which would certainly cause me to question my own training and maturity at age 46.

To Abby: condolences on the loss of Wild Eyes, but it is good to hear that you are safe. Even though your record setting attempt has ended, I am sure that further adventures await you, no matter what directions you choose for yourself.

Bon voyage, and God’s speed.

French fishing boat rescues stranded Calif. teen – Yahoo! News.

it seems like the last month has been rife with stories of corporations doing things that annoy and irritate their customers. Facebook privacy concerns. Google sniffing Wi-Fi. Apple rejecting apps for inscrutable reasons. Heck, BP not checking their blow-out preventer.

Each of these have caused me a bit of annoyance: some perhaps more than they should, some less than they should. But the subject of today’s rant is AT&T’s New Lower-Priced Wireless Data Plans. Their own press release says that customers can choose between two new more affordable plans: “either a $15 per month entry plan or a $25 per month plan with 10 times more data.”

Wow, sounds great huh?

Well, for some people it probably is. Maybe even for me. Let’s look at my data usage over the last few months:

As you can see, I’m probably safe in the 2GB usage pattern, so I could in theory sign up for the 2GB data plan for $25 and save myself $5 a month. So why am I unhappy?

Three things:

First of all, there are overages. Cell phone companies love to charge you overages. Let’s say that you sign up for the DataPlus plan, and use 201 megabytes in a month, instead of 199 megabytes. AT&T will nicely charge you $15 a month extra for the next 200. And $15 for the next one after that. Let’s say you have a bad month, like I did, and you use 1GB of transfer. AT&T will charge you $75 for that 1GB. If you just signed up for their DataPro plan, you would be charged only $25, and you’d get twice the data for that. It’s not like they have to pay some human overtime to come in and move your data around: the data is already delivered. They could charge you less, but they choose to charge you more, to entice you to do what I do, which is to sign up for a more expensive plan as a hedge against large overages. My current unlimited data plan is the best kind of hedge: a fixed rate plan. I typically use about 1/4 of what the 2GB limit would give me, but I don’t have to worry: if I need the bandwidth, it’s there. With the new proposed plan, I have no such guarantee, meaning I have to watch my usage more carefully, which is an added mental annoyance that I didn’t have before.

While I’m on this kick, here’s another pet peeve about overages. The phone company knows how many minutes you’ve used. They know how much data that you’ve used. They could just give you the option of having your service stop when you reach your limit. Previously, this was declared “impossible” by AT&T, with the net result that in a fit of teen… shall we say… indiscretion my son managed to run up a $700 cell phone bill by exceeding his minutes. Now, AT&T has the mechanism in place, but will charge you $4.99 for that privilege. That’s just extortion.

The second thing that annoys me is that AT&T is finally offering cell phone tethering. “What’s annoying about that, you ask?” Well, previously you couldn’t get tethering on the iPhone from AT&T, but today, they annouced that you can get it for $20. And for that… you get…. well, pretty much nothing. Yes, you can hook your laptop to the network via your iPhone, but you don’t get any extra bandwidth. AT&T is charging you more for the bits you sent from your laptop, based solely on their point of origin. Sure, they might reasonably expect that users who make use of tethering will use their data connections more, but they already are going to shaft you when you hit your overages anyway. That’s what those overages are meant to deter. To spend an extra $20 on top of that seems absurd.

Lastly of course, the sizing of these plans may be adequate today, but as network speeds improve (well, on OTHER cellular networks anyway) and as the demand for more bandwidth from applications like video grows, these plans will grow increasingly burdensome for more and more consumers. Which, of course, AT&T will be happy to charge you for, as you rack up more overages.

I get the motivation: there are people out there who use many times even my usage, and pay no more than I do. I’ve heard that 3% of cell phone users account for 40% of all data transmitted in the Bay Area (read it somewhere today, didn’t save the link, but even if the number is wrong, it’s probably not very wrong). Obviously, AT&T would love to get those people off the network, or at least lower their usage, because then the network behaves as if they upgraded it: they have more available bandwidth that they can sell to more customers. Heck, I’m not even really objecting to the pricing: it’s a powerful incentive to lower usage of the 3%, while actually lowering my bill MOST of the time by $5 a month. But cell phone companies already have a lot of hostile practices in place that are bad for consumers. They charge a fortune for text messages, which is idiotic. They limit voice minutes, and place no real limit on overages. They charge you for early termination. Activation. Enough. We love our cell phones, we want to use your product, but you guys have to toss us a bone once in a while.

I suspect that it might be better to pick up an iPod touch and run Skype most of the time, and get a Pay As You Go cell phone to keep in my car for emergencies. I’d probably save $400 a year on cell phone bills, and it would piss me off less.

This concludes the rant of the day.

I sent a copy of this as a letter to Joel Johnson @ Gizmodo. I have no pre-existing relationship with Joel, but was dismayed by their treatment of the next-generation iPhone release, and thought to express some of the reasons behind my general displeasure.

Hey Joel…

I thought I might drop you this little missive to express a tiny bit of the disappointment that I have with you and your fellows in your treatment of this new iPhone issue. I think that you are missing something very important, and I thought I would take the time out of my day in the (almost certainly vain) hope that you might consider the actions of Gizmodo in a different light.

Here it goes.

You guys run a gadget website. I’m frankly part of your target demographic. I own lots of gadgets, I like lots of gadgets, and I spend a fair amount of time reading about possible gadget purchases. Your reviews and discussions are frequently helpful in making my buying decisions. But let’s get real for a moment: you guys make a living by providing a venue for those who make gadgets to get attention from those who buy gadgets. This requires that you walk a rather fine line. You must provide accurate, reasonable information for consumers, or nobody will bother coming to gizmodo.com. And you must provide reasonably positive reviews of products, because no company would bother advertising on a site which gave their consistently negative reviews.

But here’s the funny thing: Apple doesn’t really advertise on the web. They prefer to use print media and television for the most part. So they don’t directly pay you for advertising. So guess what? They don’t really need you. And that means they can dictate whatever access they grant you on whatever terms they like, and you will suck it up because all the people that do use you for advertising want to hang onto the popularity of apple products to get advertising views.

In other words, you need them way more than they need you. You cover Apple products in spite of all the irritation that it might entail because it makes you money.

Another way that you can choose to make money is to traffic in gossip and rumor. You might even argue that it’s for the benefit of your readers. Heck, we all like to engage in this kind of thing. “What will the next iPhone be like?” Heck, I’d like to know. My 2 year contract is about up, it’d be great to see what was coming down the line. So, you guys write editorials speculating, and you go out into the industry and try to snoop to find out what’s going on. And, of course you try to encourage relationships with people “in the know” who might tip you off.

There isn’t anything wrong with that. The people who provide tips are grownups, and presumably can make decisions about the risk that they are willing to take in revealing their companies secrets, and can take whatever measures they think appropriate or necessary to ensure their anonymity.

But in this matter, you’ve taken that option away from Mr. Powell. He didn’t choose to reveal a company secret to you, or to sell you an Apple prototype. You acted ruthlessly, paying an (as yet anonymous) third party for access to a prototype which you knew was not their property, without regard to whom it might hurt, and shamelessly and profitably exploited the information for your own benefit. I think this is way out of line.

You can sit and pretend that outing Mr. Powell was for his benefit, and perhaps you are right. But what truly would have been to his benefit would have been to convince your anonymous third party to turn Apple’s property back over to them, and to not shamelessly exploit this information for your own benefit.

Shame on you.

I’m posting a copy of this letter to my own blog at https://brainwagon.org.

Mark VandeWettering

From a spam email that snuck pass my filter today (name was changed to prevent giving spammers free advertising)

Thanks for your interest in Mubbley Corp. To summarize, our solution allows you to:

Fully automate infrastructure delivery and dramatically reduce administrative workloads.

Leverage an industry-unique reservation model to manage current and future resources.

Easily scale solutions from individual departments to the global enterprise.

Integrate with and extend existing virtualization and data center automation investments.

Enable end users to efficiently self-serve infrastructure to support business activities.

Fully govern and control the deployment and reclamation of self-service infrastructure.

Could there be ANY more buzzwords in this? Does anyone have even the faintest clue what this means? If I were a business owner, and bought this product, other than the immediate cashing of a check, what do you think this software would actually do to help my business?

Cory Doctorow has a long write up on how he doesn’t like the iPad and why he thinks that you shouldn’t either. Since this is pretty much release day for the iPad, I thought I’d use it as a stepping stone to rant and rave a bit.

If we turn back our clock a few short years to January of 2007 when the iPhone was announced, we received all sorts of criticisms about the device. “It’s too expensive!” “It locks the user into AT&T!” “It doesn’t multitask!” “It doesn’t have a GPS!” “It doesn’t interface with X/Y/Z!” “It doesn’t do YYYY which smartphone ZZZ does!” The punditry was telling us all that it wasn’t something we should want.

Three years later, and it completely owns the smartphone market. It’s pretty clear that all those technology pundits and advocates don’t really understand why people buy gadgets of this nature.

Cory raises a bunch of points, and while they aren’t necessarily wrong, they are for the most part irrelevent.

As an example, Cory says that the iPad hardware “infantalizes hardware”. This is a hopelessly geek-centric view. For the millions of people who bought the iPhone and the millions that I predict will buy the iPad, this device isn’t a pathway to a career software design. It’s a device they can carry around, consume media, send and receive mail, and generally access the news and information that they like. The myth that Cory operates under is that somehow the devices themselves fuel interest and achievement in technology. The fact is that you could have given an Apple II to every single person in America in 1980, and you would have gotten a few more software and hardware engineers. And you would have gotten an awful lot of people playing Choplifter, and who figured out nothing more than how to run Choplifter. As much of a died in the wool software jockey as I am, I still have an un-jailbroken iPhone with a few dozen apps on it. I haven’t designed any new apps for it, and in spite of that, I’m very happy to own an iPhone. When I am standing in line at the grocery store, or want to know what movies are playing at my local theater, or want to text my sister to wish her a happy birthday, I don’t really want it to be a software design challenge.

And why all the righteous indignation for just the iPad/iPhone? Recently, it has come to my attention that most BluRay players have a pretty significant amount of computing power inside them. Why aren’t they open? Why can’t I write software for those? Why is all that amazing capability hidden away where we can’t have at it?

I haven’t as yet bought an iPad. I might. I might not. Some of the points about the lack of open-ness do offend me a bit, since I am a guy who likes to write and distribute software. But I’m a six-sigma from the norm software geek. Who am I to tell you what devices you should or shouldn’t like?

Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either) – Boing Boing.

I interrupt your normally scheduled ham radio and computer checkers postings to frankly just rant about something: I was listening to XM Radio’s old time radio channel, and there was an entirely forgettable Sherlock Holmes story. I’ve previously mentioned that much of the Sherlock Holmes fiction not done by Conan Doyle is crap, but I thought I’d enumerate a list of the things that I think are absolutely fatal to a Sherlock Holmes story.

1. Romantic involvement for Holmes. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! Did anyone not read A Scandal in Bohemia? It begins:
   

   To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise, but admirably balanced mind.

   Attempts to give Sherlock Holmes romantic interest just make an extraordinary character ordinary.

2. Misogyny. While Holmes has no real interest in women romantically, he behaves in a largely chivalrous manner. His lack of romantic interest in women is not caused by bitterness: more like a complete lack of emotional understanding. While he may find the motives of women “inscrutable”, he is for the most part rather deferential and charming, until the case is solved at least.
3. Watson as a bumbler. Watson is a doctor, a writer, and a former soldier. I blame Nigel Bruce for this far-too common portrayal.
4. Ghosts. While certain Sherlock Holmes stories begin with mysteries that appear supernatural (The Hound of the Baskervilles perhaps being the most obvious example) but in the end, the explanations are always rational. The Hound wasn’t Cerebrus, it was a mastiff covered in phosphorus. Magic and the supernatural have no place in the rationalism of Holmes’ universe. (Conan Doyle’s personal excursions into spiritualism seem not to have crept into the persona of Sherlock Holmes.)
5. Interactions with either fictional or actual characters from history. Stories which rely on interactions with Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, or Albert Einstein are just contrivances that try to suck you in by dropping names rather than telling stories.
6. That damned deerstalker hat and pipe.
7. Saying “Elementary, my dear Watson”. You won’t find the phrase in Conan Doyle’s works, but it has become a cliche in poor imitators.
8. Stories which overplay the extremes of Holmes’ character, either negative (his drug use, his fits of boredom where he peppered the walls of 221B with his revolver) or his virtue (while mostly chivalrous, he wasn’t above showing impatience and petulance with those he feels unworthy). The beauty of Conan Doyle’s portrayal is at once the extraordinary nature of Holmes’ character, but also the reality of it.

Why did I bother to write this stuff down? No real reason, other than that I really enjoy the canon of fifty six short stories and four novels, and have read them all multiple times. The least of these are better (in my opinion) than 99% of all the subsequent works using these characters. As much as I’d like to complain about how much bad fiction there is out there, there is something truly great: that the characters themselves have passed into the public domain, and are free for all of us who have enjoyed the originals to adapt with new ideas and new adventures.

That’s pretty cool too.

I normally read the blog of W9OY for its ham radio content, but this morning he waxed poetical on the impending cessation of human space flights here in the United States. His vantage point in sight of the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Cape make it especially poignant for him.

Software Defined Ham Radio: End of an Era.

First of all, I’m a child of the Apollo era. I remember watching launches on our old Zenith black and white. I remember dashing home from Church at age 5 to hear news of the Apollo 11 lander. My interest in science and technology was fueled by the fires of Apollo, and the idea that they could be harnessed to achieve great things for all mankind. After setting foot on the moon, who knew what the actual limit of mankind would be?

But for all that, I’m not especially broken up about the cessation of human space flights. The reasons are essentially three fold:

First, there is a cost/benefit ratio. Sending humans into space costs money, and a lot of it. Humans are capable of performing some tasks in space which are impossible for current machines (like the Hubble reservicing), but were servicing not a possibility, the money spent on it would have been channeled into other areas, perhaps equally as fruitful for scientists. Compare the budget for reservicing the HST to the total cost for the twin Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea. It is much simpler to design satellites when freed from the need to keep the soft, squishy humans inside within the a gassy envelope of the proper temperature, within G limits, and shielded from damaging radiation.

Secondly, NASA funding has essentially become a source of pork barrel jobs. Congress hands out funding not because of any particular dedication to space travel, or the development of new technologies, but because for some of them the money they hand out buys jobs in their districts, and those jobs mean re-election. Every president since Kennedy has given flowery speeches about the importance of “sending men to the stars”, and frankly they’ve all been insincere. The reality is that NASA was a vast employer, and keeping those jobs going meant political stability for the Congressmen and Senators who were the beneficiaries of this federal generosity.

Lastly, I believe that if we are to have a lasting presence in space, it must be driven by economic factors. We have lauded the pioneers of the American West as bold innovators and frontiersmen, but for the most part they were people who saw an economic opportunity that didn’t exist where they were. They left their jobs to homestead a farm, or to search for gold, or just to sell goods to those that did. The federal government didn’t manufacture this opportunity. The next stage of space exploration will be fueled by the economic opportunities exploited by individuals and companies.

I’ve visited the VAB. I’ve seen the Saturn V, and thrilled to the multimedia presentations on the Apollo 11 in their visitor’s center, which reminded me of the thrill I had at age five. Heck, I’ve even had my salary paid as part of a NASA grant back when I was in graduate school over twenty years ago. But with 40+ year history of manned space flight, a grand total of about four hundred fifty people have been in space. 18 Americans and 4 Russians died there (about 5% of those launched).

It is likely that no reasonable economic case can be made for men in space until the costs are reduced by at least one and maybe two orders of magnitude and the safety of spaceflight increased by similar orders of magnitude. That sounds difficult, but those numbers are not significantly different than the increase in reliability in conventional air travel over the last three quarters of a century. The government played a role in this, but it didn’t have to own airlines to do so. I suspect it will be the same with human spaceflight. Companies like Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic and probably ones that have not even been formed yet will lead the way for humans to go back to space.

And, quite frankly I think we have bigger things to worry about down here on earth. Things like health care for the sick. Like education. Like feeding the hungry. Do we really want to spend billions putting a few more humans in orbit when there are so many pressing issues that Americans (and indeed, the people of the world) face every single day?

From JFK’s Inaugural Address:

To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Indeed.