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Underhill42 t1_j5vs4at wrote

I think a big issue was simply that using an NTP on Earth is a really, really bad idea - I seem to recall hearing of an idea from that era of flying one over the USSR to essentially carpet-dirty-bomb them into submission.

And off Earth... we haven't had any national interest in doing that. The moon race was good cold-war propaganda and ritualized combat... bringing nukes into it was exactly what we were trying to avoid. Going to other planet's though? Where's the profit, power, or security in that? Especially after determining that the moon was just a big dead rock we were nowhere close to being ready to usefully colonize, and photos from the 1965 Mariner mission established that Mars was probably the same.

Yeah, the long-term dreams are inspirational - but it's likely to be generations before anything except mostly-automated asteroid mining (which was completely out of reach at the time) will be able to turn a profit, and colonialism is all about getting rich. Not having your great-grandkids get rich, assuming they can even maintain a position to cash out on your investment rather than someone else's grandkids being the ones to do so.

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