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Originally posted by CATPIRATE:
Did not do a lot of interviews or time in the spot light.

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“I’m very concerned that the new plan, as I understand it, will prohibit us from having human access to low-earth orbit on our own rockets and spacecraft until the private aerospace industry is able to qualify their hardware under development as rated for human occupancy. With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the national academies, industry or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement.'
-Neil Armstrong, CNS News, Obama’s NASA Plan a ‘Blueprint for a Mission to Nowhere’

"Private contractors are whacking people like crazy over for the CIA. It seems to have marked the first time the U.S. government outsourced a covert assassination service to private enterprise. Running operations through Blackwater gave the CIA the power to have people abducted, or killed, with no one in the government being exactly responsible. The program was kept from Congress for seven years. And when Leon Panetta told legislators about it in 2009, he revealed that the CIA had hired the private security firm Blackwater to help run it. Enrique Prado, a high-ranking CIA-officer-turned-Blackwater-employee, oversaw assassination units for both the CIA and the contractor. A federal organized crime squad run out of the Miami-Dade Police Department produced an investigation allegedly tying Prado to seven murders carried out while he worked as a bodyguard for a narco crime boss. At the time, the CIA declared him unavailable for questioning; the investigation was shut down before he was arrested or tried. While Blackwater's covert unit began as a Bush administration story, President Obama now owns it. In 2010, his administration intervened on behalf of the Blackwater executives indicted for weapons trafficking, filing motions to suppress evidence on the grounds that it could compromise national security. The administration then awarded Blackwater (which is now called Academi) a $250 million contract to perform unspecified services for the CIA. At the same time, Obama has publicly taken responsibility for some lethal operations -- the Navy SEALs' sniper attack on Somali pirates, the raid on bin Laden. His aides have also said that he reviews target lists for drone strikes. The president's actions give him the appearance of a man who wants the best of both worlds. He appears as a tough, resolute leader when he announces his role in killings that will likely be popular -- a pirate, a terrorist. But the apparatus for less accountable killings grinds on."
-The Atlantic, How to Get Away With Murder in America: The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit, 18 Jul 2012

"In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba. Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities. The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war. America's top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: 'We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,' and, 'casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.' The Joint Chiefs even proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn during the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for war with Cuba, the documents show. Should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, they wrote, "the objective is to provide irrevocable proof … that the fault lies with the Communists."
-ABC News, U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba, 1 May 2001
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92662&page=1
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/

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Originally posted by Lemming:
I just hope future generations (and it saddens me too that it will be future ones and not ours probably) are able to create the infrastructure that allows "survival with style". Who knows, private space venures are an early stage reality now and companies that can see money in space will want access. Fingers crossed. I want to see more real spaceships, a abase on the moonm Mars, all the things that the Apollo age promised as possible and that folk like Armstrong wanted (still do) to see become a reality. That would be his and their best legacy.

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