Posted on 01/26/2004 1:53:41 AM PST by ambrose
Bush's corporate gravy train to Mars
On January 14, US President George Bush announced the he had set a human mission to Mars as a long-range goal after NASA, the US space agency, builds a base on the Moon.
According to the January 16 Washington Post, a senior Bush administration official said the impetus for the new space policy was Bush's desire to give NASA a clear mission after the February 1 disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia during its atmospheric re-entry.
Under the new policy, the fleet of three remaining space shuttles will be retired once construction of the International Space Station (ISS) is completed in 2010. The partially reusable shuttle will be replaced by a safer, wingless Apollo-type "crew exploration vehicles", no later than 2014. These will be used to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS, and to return astronauts to the Moon no later than 2020 to establish a lunar base as "a stepping stone" for future flights to Mars.
In July 1989, 20 years after Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin became the first human beings to set foot on the Moon, Bush's father announced a similar plan to have astronauts return to the Moon and then to undertake missions to Mars. However, Congress balked when the price tag - US$400 billion - was revealed.
In reviving his father's Moon-Mars exploration plan, Bush junior avoided indicating what it would cost, confining himself to announcing that he would ask Congress to increase NASA's budget ($15.4 billion in 2004) by an average of 5% per year over the next three years, and approximately 1% for the two years after those.
Bush claimed his Moon-Mars exploration plan is aimed at advancing "US scientific, security, and economic interests". In reality, it is being driven by the profit-making interests of the US aerospace corporations.
The January 16 Washington Post revealed that Bush's "renewed spirit of discovery" reflects "long-held ambitions of the US aerospace and energy industries". The Post went on to report: "For years, they have labored to persuade NASA to pursue interplanetary voyages more aggressively, with companies standing to reap billions of dollars from the contracts and spinoff technologies that would result... Among the companies that could profit from the plan are Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and Halliburton Co., which Vice-President Cheney headed before he joined Bush's ticket."
According to the Post, the big aerospace corporations are "hungry" for new NASA contracts: "Many companies consolidated in the 1990s, with Boeing and Lockheed Martin emerging as by far the dominant contractors. One or the other oversees virtually every major NASA program, and a Boeing-Lockheed joint venture, the United Space Alliance, manages the space shuttle program.
"The companies had counted on a huge jump in commercial space business from the telecommunications industry, but when the internet boom went bust and when fiber optics replaced satellites as the medium of choice, commercial space launches evaporated."
Of course, the NASA corporate gravy train - even with a $400 billion (over 25-30 years) humans-to-Mars program - is small beer compared to the hundreds of billions a year that are funnelled into corporate coffers via the Pentagon's $370 billion-plus annual budget.
It is also small beer compared to the more than $350 billion a year that is shelled out to the big banks in interest payments on the US government's accumulated debt of $4 trillion - largely built up as a result of government borrowing to finance past Pentagon budgets.
From Green Left Weekly, January 28, 2004.
If it increases our standard of living then it shouldn't be too hard to persuade the American people to pay for it, instead of sending the bill to our grandchildren. Mine are far enough in debt already.
Of course, and Cheney's Halliburton! LOL!
Money spent on people actually working and producing tangible products = bad'bout cover it?Money given away to leftist slackers = good
It baffes me and depresses the hell out of me. I had thought that the hallmark of conservatism was rational and logical thinking not knee-jerk reactionism - especially with the counterarguements of 'I don't believe it so it isn't true no matter how much proof you have.'
Most of them are trolls.
The Democratic Congress who spent $6000 billion on their failed "War on Poverty".
It's good to see the far left on record complaining about federal deficits. Of course they get things wrong. A lot of the interest payments go to individuals and foreign governments. And the deficits are due to waste, inefficiency, and vote buying, not any particular program.
Yeah, I know. Mainly the waste of talent by those who climb the corporate ladder. The contracts themselves are fairly clean as a rule until it comes time for change orders.
The space program was sold with vision of large numbers of people in space and with a lot of visible progress. That didn't happen, so the new paradigm in people's heads is a flash in the pan, flags and footprints effort that immediately goes away when the goal is met in the most cursory fashion.
Plus these people are sick of looking at their tax bill and unable to go after the substance of their bill (entitlements) they focus on symbols (space exploration.)
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