Sen Rubio, supposedly a fiscal conservative, shows with perfect clarity America’s problem. NASA is one of the things you don’t get to do when you’re broke. Yet politicians lament and look for funds we don’t have to continue programs we can’t afford. Here’s a little hint, Marco: it all won’t come out of NPR, the National Endowwment for the Arts or by defunding Planned Parenthood.
NASA is a tiny fraction of the federal budget. You can cut its budget by getting rid of the global warming hoax nonsense and shutting down GISS without shutting down all of NASA. If you shut down NASA then you lose all the talent present there, and you lose the leading role the US plays in spaceflight. We’re on the verge of losing it as it is. SpaceX is great and all, but they wouldn’t exist if NASA hadn’t come first.
Like Lewis and Clark, NASA needs to map out the way for future development, but if we don’t do it soon, someone else like China will. You don’t want China to have control over the moon while we’re stuck in low earth orbit or worse. NASA’s probes are the Lewis and Clarks of today’s generation, letting us know what’s out there so we can figure out how to get there and what we can use once we get there. The difference is, we don’t have a sovereign claim over any of it, so if we don’t use it, someone else will and we will be paying the price for generations to come.
NASA should be ensuring our presence in space and on the moon by building “gas stations in space” as was recently proposed and making it possible to refuel mid-trip. They should be working to make it easier for private industry to access the moon on their own to generate their own profits from resource gathering, instead of just buying flights off of them. Build the roads, let the private industry use them. The way things are going, government is going to buy the cars and trucks instead, keeping the private industry entirely dependent on the government dollar which will only be enough to keep us circling our own planet while other nations forge ahead.