Video: Boy is very, very very sad because NASA.gov is not working

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It looks like the games are still up and playable at archive.org. The buzz lightyear game, for example. Its too bad he didn’t check there, or that the shutdown page didn’t direct you to usable, archived versions.

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Oh, man up kid!

Think of the big picture: If it weren’t for the shutdown you’d be facing a future where poor people have health insurance and you’d have to carry around pictures of Karl Marx and worship in the direction of moslamia five times a day while waiting in line for your mandatory abortion.

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Sooo…what? There’s no more games on the internet to play now?

This doesn’t really prove much except maybe that there’s a lot of money being spent on frivolous things at multiple govt agencies. Kids games are integral to NASA’s mission?

At least he wasn’t on vacation in a park - then they’d really give him something to cry about. http://www.newburyportnews.com/local/x1442580373/Gestapo-tactics-meet-senior-citizens-at-Yellowstone

“No recreating for you!!!”

The tea party cannot be parodied

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you forgot to mention the death panels!

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Hey, I was talking to a little kid. You don’t want me to scare him, do you?

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Just call them “naptime panels”

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I get it now. I thought Tea Partiers were just run-of-the-mill lunatics. Turns out they’re all community center evening writing workshop dropouts looking for a place to self-publish their shitty blockbuster scripts. No wonder they hate community organizers so much…

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Well, I’ll bite. Not on the Gestapo hyperbole, that’s a whole other ball of wax (having to use the bathroom on the bus and cut your vacation short = humiliated, starved, enslaved, and exterminated now?) but on the videogame stuff. Sure, Your general point that these NASA games aren’t an “essential function” of the government is fine by me. But a child who loves NASA’s games over candy crush and temple run is a positive outcome from non-essential services. This is now a kid growing up playing educational STEM games with an early seed of love for STEM in general, and space exploration specifically planted firmly. If government, through public broadcasting and government supported game development (a lot of money? on a flash game? really?) can build excitement for the next generation, then mission accomplished. Long-term soft-effort stuff is a little harder to see the value in, I understand, but lift your eyes to the horizon, you’ll see it.

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Can I like your response more than once?

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Kids games are integral to NASA’s mission?

Yes absolutely.

I remember a quote I saw on here once from a NASA engineer (maybe Homer Hickam?). He said that every rocket scientist he knew developed an interest in space before the age of 12. Every one.

Actually, getting kids interested in space might be one of the most important things that NASA does

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I’m not even American and the Tea Party piss me off. Their very existence takes a bit of the light out of the Universe…

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Poor little guy. How can a bright little kid understand losing something like that. I do understand that in the grand scheme of things that hurt kids this is not a great wound, at least to our adult eyes. Regardless he has been hurt…perhaps a teaching moment but I’d give comfort before the lesson.

It is simply preparing him for the other 90% of space exploration, which is paperwork and bureaucracy.

I think a few seconds of reflection should show hosting that sort of webpage costs little for what it can accomplish, and as far as government spending goes is so trivial, you could slash such things for years and the only difference it would make is that you’d be too busy to notice where the real spending is.

But nobody is pretending this is a great failing of the government shutdown. This is a kick-the-dog story: Kruz, Boehner, and their fellow crusaders have left workers without pay, the US at risk of defaulting, cancer patients without treatment, food programs unfunded, infectious diseases unmonitored…and they took away a 5-year-old’s video games.

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Write a letter to Boehner. He’ll cry with you.

One of my high school classmates works for JPL. He is an ACTUAL rocket scientist (being graded on a curve with that guy and a couple of other geniuses in physics was very tough - I had to retake these classes with my brother’s less gifted class). From his Facebook posts, I’ve learned that JPL isn’t shut down, but many NASA projects are on hold right now, including some where critical flight windows are open right now for projects that are at the end of development and ready for launch.

This shutdown is going to cost us millions, billions, on delayed projects of all sorts - just heard that the window of time for scientists to go to Antarctica is closing and so this season all kinds of data might not be collected on long term projects.

I feel sorry for the kid he can’t play his favorite games, and having known a few extraordinary scientists and engineers in my time, I’m sure that he will find another avenue to channel his interests into until the shutdown is over. Meantime, for some people, their life’s work is tied to government funding. It is abhorrent to me that these people are being prevented from doing their work, critical and important to us all, because congresspeople cannot do their jobs.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend who had started premedical training late in life. She decided to quit when it was explained to her that she would never get into medical school - that the expense the school would put into her would not be worth it for a doctor that would have a shorter than normal career.

Training a scientist or engineer is a significant investment that we all make. To become a PhD in fields such as rocket science or chemistry is - as others have pointed out - a huge investment that does begin in elementary school. To miss a year out of a scientist’s career is a big cost, much more than just the salary. We only get these people for so long. What is the cost to delay the pipeline into these careers?

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