The Difference Is Stunning, So Is The Cost

Take a close look at the photo below. It shows a Soyuz spacecraft being taken to it's launchpad, not on some giant lumbering high-maintenance multi-million dollar Caterpillar kind of thing, but on a flat car in a train - along with other freight - pulled down the track by a decades old diesel locomotive.

Everything you see in the photo cost millions and millions less than what we were spending to put an astronaut into space. The Soyuz spacecraft... cheaper, mass-producible,  extremely reliable, still flying.

Long term, seems the Russians had the right idea after all. While we spent massive fortunes on the Cadillac version of everything, The Russians built a cheap, throwaway version of a vehicle to get into space.

Well, they're still getting into space, going up to the space station we delivered and built, but now we're now sitting on our thumbs while our mind-bogglingly expensive space shuttles and astronauts gather dust in museums and waiting rooms.

But not to worry, we still have one astronaut that just went into space on the latest Soyuz, some woman you've never heard of... playing flight engineer on a Russian spacecraft. Getting her into space on that rocket  cost us taxpayers a bit over seventy million dollars, just for her seat on the rocket. What with her training, space suit, necessary equipment and so forth,  her Soyuz ride is costing us close to a 100 million dollars.

What a joke. That sort of money to give some woman a joy ride.

The money would have been better spent on another Mars lander.  At least we would have got some photos out of that.

And what will we get for the money we have shelled out for our astronaut/Soyus flight engineer? Not very much, because the reality of the situation is that nobody is doing very much on the space station other than the necessary maintenance to keep it flying.

Upwards of a hundred million bucks for someone to take notes, read meters, and do station housework.

Texlahoma asks us on his blog just "How stupid do they think we are"?

Idiocy like this pretty much answers the question.