Posted on 02/09/2010 7:15:40 AM PST by outpostinmass2
While discussing his spending priorities, President Obama used an image we can all understand: the shrinking family budget. We have less money to spend, he explained, at home and on Capitol Hill. So good on him for ditching the manned (shouldn’t that be “personned’’?) space program. It is the unneeded and extravagant lawn service of the federal government. I grew up with the fairy tale of the space program: brave men with crewcuts, such as the tragically (and pointlessly) martyred Gus Grissom, launching themselves into space, um . . . because it was there? Because the Russians had done so first? Because Life magazine and the nascent, already powerful medium of television marshaled huge audiences for the flights?
If space flight had a reason to exist, that reason ended, dramatically, on July 20, 1969. Mission accomplished, as my old pal George W. Bush memorably stated. Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon represented the apogee of American civilization, and the fulfillment of an ambitious technological and economic commitment undertaken by President Kennedy. We should have quit while we were ahead.
But we didn’t. Late-20th-century America was a land of plenty, so we financed silly, follow-on moon missions, the Lost-in-Space charade of Skylab, the absurd, US-Russian Apollo-Soyuz, the ill-fated shuttle missions, and the International Space Station. Nothing has been quite so cynical as NASA’s propaganda war to preserve the thousands of jobs at its taxpayer-funded outposts in Alabama, Florida, Texas, and California. In 1986 a New Hampshire school teacher perished in an elaborate and pointless NASA publicity stunt, sending an “ordinary’’ American on the space shuttle. Her six crewmates died, too, and 17 years later seven other astronauts died when the Columbia disintegrated on reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
There is no money to be made in space because space is off limits to profiteers and military according to the international outer space treaty.
China won’t be too worried about it but when they have the high ground we’ll all do exactly as we’re told.
They will be sent to China for their mission of space. Thanks Barry!
I hope that the soon-to-be ex-NASA and other aerospace workers remeber this come 2012. There will be thousands of them looking for less challenging jobs then. Hope they help run the usurper out of HIS “job”. I don;t know Sarah Palins view on the space program but would hope it’s far different than Ø’s.
We need to dump that stupid outer space treaty that puts space on equal footing with antarctica. Nothing can be claimed by any nation so any profit found belongs to the world. (under the control of the UN of course)
NASA, under Hanses, has fudged the “global warming” dat, in lockstep with Phil Jones over at East Anglia.
The real problem is that because NASA is a government program, it eventually got swallowed by the Left.
The answer, as always, is to defund the Left. This would include (but not limited to):
1. Lawyers
2. Universities - even the “hard” sciences are infested
3. Welfare/Medicaid
4. “Affordable housing” advocates
5. Ethanol for fuel
6. Alternative energy subsidies
7. Farm price supports
8. “Affirmative” action
After that, we can cut our military. But we may not need to.
NASA, 1961-1980, paid for itself about 6-20 times over in basic research that had many practical applications. Since 1980, the warmists at NASA have caused NASA to become unprofitable to run. Again, defund the Left.
Completely out of touch with the hard fact that the last five or more generations in this Country have been raised on the Space Program, and many of them who are now adults do not find Premier Hussein’s ideas for space exploration any better than any of his other “visions” for anything.
Premier Hussein is the least qualified guy in any room where serious discussion of this topic takes place. He knows nothing and has never run so much as a popsickle stand in his life.
>> We need to dump that stupid outer space treaty that puts space on equal footing with antarctica. Nothing can be claimed by any nation so any profit found belongs to the world. (under the control of the UN of course) <<
Exactly, we should find a way to start a space race with china and see if we still have any American ingenuity left over....
There’s nothing quite like the mutterings of the belligerantly ignorant, is there.
I wonder if that had something to do with the success of NASA in the 60’s...
and the total lack of success today?
“None of those things wouldn’t exist in their current form without the knowledge gained in NASA missions.”
Total BS.
You want a space program, you pay for it.
Hank!
Oh, and we don’t even have the blueprints for the Saturn V! Collectors alone would cheerfully have paid for, and protected, the design documents, and surely the NASA museum could have.
The original NASA was designed as a high-budget skunkworks. If we were to go back to that philosophy, it’d be easy to reconstruct NASA. But a lot of heads would need to roll.
Treaties? The U.S. Supreme Court said that the sitting U.S. President can unilaterally abrogate treaties. Case was Nixon abrogating the treaty with China (not to be confused with the “People’s Republic (Mainland, Red)” of China.
So solar power satellites are as good an idea as when they were first proposed in 1977. And since these plans were privately developed, we still have the blueprints. All we need are a few dozens of Saturn V rockets. Of course, they would tend to go into geosynchronous orbits, so maybe the cable companies would be a touch annoyed, but power satellites would use different frequencies.
“Total BS.
You want a space program, you pay for it.
Hank!”
Ignorance and lack of vision isn’t exclusive property of the left.
“... we should find a way to start a space race with china and see if we ...”
Who’s WE? And your contribution will be what?
Most of the people on this thread have very big ambitions—for other people’s money!
Hank
I do agree with the author on this point. America has been a nation in decline ever since.
What was once a great country with a can do attitude that had heroes who walked on the moon we have become a nation the views its hero as a pedophile who moon walked.
“Ignorance and lack of vision isn’t exclusive property of the left.”
Willingness to confiscate citizen’s hard-earned dollars to pay for one’s pet projects isn’t either.
There is no lack of vision or creativity in the American people. Only idiots look to government for true creativity.
Hank
Leftists hate the pioneer culture of America. The culture we were born out of and still pumps within the veins of America’s best!
http://www.wvmetronews.com/index.cfm?func=displayfullstory&storyid=35003
Funding for NASA’s effort to get the U.S. back to the Moon has been cut from the $3.8 trillion federal budget President Barack Obama has submitted to Congress.
It’s a $100 billion cut to the Constellation program former President George W. Bush implemented. The goal was to develop a new kind of rocket that get Americans back to the Moon by 2020. Critics say the project was overbudget and behind schedule.
Former NASA Scientist and Author Homer Hickam, who is originally from McDowell County, says the payoff from such a trip to the Moon, though, would be much greater than the money invested in the effort.
“You can’t be a great country without doing great things and a great thing would be to return to the Moon and build a laboratory there and open it up to the world,” Hickam said on Tuesday’s MetroNews Talkline.
Hickam says he’s angry about the cut.
“It’s really a foolish decision to take away the goal of going back to the Moon. I can certainly see figuring out a better way of doing it, but simply to take away the goal, I think, is so shortsighted and so foolish that it’s almost breathtaking in its stupidity.”
At the same time the Moon plan is being cut, NASA is set to receive additional money in the proposed budget to develop new commercial spacecraft to carry astronauts into low Earth orbit. Private companies would play a larger role in developing those transport methods.
Hickam says he supports that part of the proposal, but without the Moon, he sees no reason for NASA.
“It’s essentially now an $18 billion slush fund to go off and do nothing,” Hickam said.
“You can see a lot of political payoffs that are about to occur, going out to universities and so on for a lot of paperwork and studies that will actually not result in cutting metal at all.”
Congress has to approve the President’s proposed budget.
Apparently the DOD also has concerns for Obama’s vision for the future.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2447127/posts
“Willingness to confiscate citizen’s hard-earned dollars to pay for one’s pet projects isn’t either.”
Well, you and Obama are in the same camp on this one. Must make you feel proud.
You’re one of those guys that’s so far right, there’s little common ground for me and you. Makes it pretty easy for me to dismiss what you say. However, feel free to keep firing away.
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