Maggie's Farm

Aw.

So support SPACE! anyway. Raise my taxes, Mister President!

In fairness to Tom, while his assertions about SPACE! were in the admitted vein that it's akin to a national addiction and thus self-justified its inherent, unstated, and egotistical merits, I too grew up in the penumbra of the Cold War and the high national pride of getting off the damned rock for miraculous new rocks. And that then segued into the space-as-entertainment phenomenon so ably practiced by both Hollywood and at least a few dozen authors whose yellowing paperbacks I still haul with me. There we learned how to zoom around in the Middle of Nothing when we weren't throwing levers on our starship dashboards and reappearing in entirely new galaxies.

So yes, we want to do this thing. Badly. But from mixture of all of this we developed this notion that we would "explore" space. And travel to the stars.

But even if we could, which we clearly cannot, this gives us not a damn thing to do out there. The nearest extra-solar star -- which takes over four years to reach...at the speed of light, which is itself orders of magnitude faster than we can ever go -- is just another Sun and what orbits it just cannot be landed on, or especially, ever left with a payload.

At least not as a federal agency in an era of a swiftly declining country that owes this apparent demise to failed and failing federal programs, agencies, and policies. If you want to do it with the name of a Rutan or a Branson on the side of your tiny carbon-fiber airplane, fine. But not with NASA's half-million pound rocket motor (motor, not the entire craft) with a nuclear reactor at its core. Or with some other vast, wasteful, solid fuel retread that we can only ever justify with some warped sense of unavoidable national pride and the mistaken notion that hammering the thing together CREATES JOBS! like some redo of Soviet make-work.

We're already doing that in the form of a couple of billion more printed each day just to keep the serfs from rioting. Oh, and do you think that's hyperbole?

MF claims it's a small-government kinda place. I beseech its writers then to consider just what advocating for throwing money into a literal vacuum means for small government. We're the better part of a quarter trillion upside down and we're going to "create jobs" via a space program built on either the inherent profitability of this vacuum we float in or tax revenues? Really?

it will give him an opportunity to explain why he thinks we will never achieve anything of use in space.

As I've explained already, because the physics aren't supportable by anything we can afford.

Or, to put it another way, SPACE EXPLORERS!, consider this your opportunity to explain why you "think" we will achieve anything of use in space.

The moon projects were dick-waving, NASA is make-work egotism and socialism for scientists, the vaunted Intntl Space Station is being decommissioned, and unmanned Earth orbit, while useful and conquered, hardly agrees with your fantasies.

Where's that NASA post?