The Freepers against NASA are a small vocal minority.
Most seem to have an extreme libertarian view of things I have noticed.
NASA is nation defining agency, it is a manifestation of our pioneer spirit, of our nation born of the frontiers.
It is the R&D of the nation. It is our future.
The nations that lead on the frontiers, dictate the course of human history.
Naturally Obama wants to screw it up.
I truly despise that man to the core.
I am living in a national nightmare.
Amen and amen.
It is the R&D of the nation. It is our future.
The thing about that, is it's wasteful ... because many things in R&D don't pan out. That's just the way it goes. So, those who figure that the government shouldn't be "wasting money" will hit at R&D first ... because it's an easy target.
Thus, you get rid of R&D as a very wasteful expense, you see...
That's what you're dealing with, when everything is right down to the "dollars and cents" of government spending and you want to chop everything you can.
R&D is an easy target for chopping and NASA is also an especially easy target.
For me, it isn’t a libertarian thing to eliminate the manned space program.
The fact is, NASA has bungled the job since the end of Apollo. The Shuttle program has been a huge money pit, Skylab augered in, and now we’re flinging money into a space station that is being used more as a piece of international relations than a space program.
NASA does far better at unmanned space exploration. As soon as you put a man into a mission, the complexity and cost go up exponentially. For what we’re pissing away on manned space shots, we could be sending probes all over the place, developing hard science.
NASA isn’t anything like a “manifestation of our pioneer spirit.” It is an outgrowth of the defense sector from WWII, where they carved out a “civilian” space program to make it look like it wasn’t being run by the military (ie, USAF).
Get used to this one over-riding fact of our future: We’re broke. Utterly and completely broke. Serious cost-cutting is coming, because the alternative will be a devaluation of the US dollar that will destabilize the world.