Poor Republican

I mean, really fund it so it doesn’t end up like this:

NASA’s budget has been neglected under every president and Congress in at least the last thirty years.  Sure, $17.6 billion sounds like a lot, but the budget deficit for California is bigger than that.  The NASA budget is typically about 0.5% of Federal spending.  The result is pitiful.

The country that put men on the moon (the ONLY men) is going to have to depend on Russia to reach the International Space Station.  And recent events have shown that Russia is not exactly our friend.  Every time they get peeved with their neighbors they cut off natural gas supplies.  Is it so hard to think that they might do the same to us regarding space flights?

The country that came into the 1960s with no real space program, rudimentary computing power and little experience went from no manned flight in space to landing on the moon in only eight years.  That same country, when talking about going back to the moon, wants to take at least ten years to get back to a place we’ve already been to.  On top  of that, they’re building a vehicle that is basically the same design from the 60s, only bigger and updated.  All those engineers and we couldn’t get a different design?

They’re arguing over how to get it all into space.  Let me put that into perspective.  People see the Shuttle Transportation System (the official name for the complete Shuttle launch gear) go up and they think it’s really impressive.  Okay, well, it is.

What most people don’t know is that the  Saturn V rocket that carried the Apollo astronauts on the moon missions was almost four times as powerful as the the Shuttle system is.  And we built it forty years ago.

Now we can’t figure out how to do it?  Seriously?

The Apollo program was designed on computers with less processing power than most collegiate pocket calculators, and the guidance computer was worse.  You are reading this using a computer that in all probability has more power than all the spacecraft flown from day one until at least the 1990s put together.

But we can’t design and build a spacecraft to return to the moon in less time than it took to get there in the first place?  How can that be?

Follow the money.  It’s true that NASA’s budget is far more diluted than it was back then, with satellites and probes absorbing a lot of the budget.  The Shuttle itself absorbs even more.  But it wouldn’t matter if NASA had any real money to begin with.

People say “but what about welfare, healthcare, etc.” when the subject of space exploration is raised.   In the 2007 budget, we spent 98 dollars on social programs for every dollar spent on NASA.

I think we can spare a little.

Welfare programs and handouts to illegal aliens produce nothing.  Space exploration produces mankind-changing advances.  You can see many of them with a simple Google search.  Much like the Never-To-Be-Sufficiently-Damned “Bloated Pentagon Budget,” NASA programs benefit our everyday lives in ways the vast majority of its critics enjoy but aren’t even aware of.

And there’s that one other minor problem.  Humanity is growing.  No matter what we do to the contrary, eventually, we will outgrow the space and resources of this planet.  No amount of abortions, birth control, recycling, or light bulb bans will change that.  When it finally happens, wouldn’t it be nice to have a place to go?

If it takes ten years to send a couple of guys back to a place we’ve already been to, how long will it take to send hundreds, thousands or even more to places we’ve never been to before?

It seems to me like it might be a good idea to get a head start on the project.  To do that, they’re going to need a little more money over at NASA, Mr. Obama.  How about we throw some “stimulus” where it might do some real good?

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