Why the Moon, Mars and Beyond? It is a Matter of Surviving

Back in January of this year, just after Obama was sworn in as President, he got into a controversy by saying the $787 billion stimulus bill would save construction equipment maker Caterpillar from having to cut 20,000 jobs. The stimulus bill has come and while going, it has not saved those jobs at Caterpillar nor at numerous other business and industries. One way to actually stimulate Caterpillar and the economy is to spend those billions going to the moon, Mars and beyond. John F, Kennedy said we should not go to the moon because it is easy, but because it is hard. And he was right and that goal is still right. Plus it will create many, many high paying jobs and positions that will get the economy back on a rising track. To begin with those lost jobs at Caterpillar, going to the moon, Mars and beyond will require construction equipment: bulldozers, front end loaders, backhoes, drag lines, cranes and such. New version modified to work on the dust covered, airless surface of the moon where there is an abundance of priceless Helium-3, the perfect fuel for nuclear fusion. New versions for working in the thin atmosphere of Mars and versions to mine the asteroid belt for uncounted trillions and trillions of dollars in precious minerals and substances yet to be discovered. It is like the gold strike in 1849 California and a liberal Democrat congress says it is too expensive to go all that way. And if we go there, it is too hard and costly to mine. We better just forget it and spend the money on our supporters here at home. Sound familiar?

They tell us that man has been on the planet for over a million years in one form or another and for some unknown reason we only have about 3000 years worth of history. It’s at least possible that we might find another 10K or 20K worth of human history inside some sort of a library or something inside one of those Martian megaliths.

If you spent your trillions actually building something, the stimulus might actually stimulate something. His idea of stimulus, though, is to spend that money handing power over to his cronies. In other words, the very word “stimulus” is a con. We’ve just been ripped off in the biggest rip-off in the history of the republic, and no one said a word. No one even noticed. A couple trillion missing from the cashbox and no one noticed.

Look at the moon program as a stimulus - It want past purely economic. It spilled over into technological advancements that spread into many other fields we see in everyday life. I do not worship at the shrine of JFK, but must give credit where credit is due. JFK’s version of doing something hard was with a definite goal, even if it seemed to be setting the bar high. The definition of doing something hard according to Obama and the Marxist Left amounts to nothing more than pushing a heavy head trip on people, while the elites laugh at the masses. Think global warming/climate change/WTF it’s called next week.

Look at the moon program as a stimulus... It spilled over into technological advancements that spread into many other fields we see in everyday life.

I agree with you. I'll tell you what a real stimulus would look like in my opinion. A huge push for "real" energy independence - we spend half a trillion a year buying fuel from abroad when we've got huge untapped reserves between our offshore oil and oil shale and coal that could be liquified... keeping that half trillion in the US would kick our economy into gear in a big way.

And a concerted effort to put men into space in a big way. We went from nothing to a man on the moon in about ten years if you count the early days under Eisenhower, and we did it with computers that wouldn't run your kid's gameboy. We've already been to the moon, it shouldn't take us decades to get back there if we want to go, we could be back in 5. This time we should go to stay. Building a colony there, and starting down the road to Mars would kick start new technologies that would immediately spill out into the rest of the economy. The engineers that develop this stuff always wind up working in other industries and all that technology goes with them. The companies that build the higest of high tech stuff always wind up side-lining that know-how into consumer goods.

Those two things alone would put us on the move again.

In my opinion, the country that masters space travel will own the coming century, and the rest of us will work for them. It could be us, but at the rate we're going it will be someone else, and our grandkids will work for them.

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