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How Barack Obama ruined NASA space exploration
How Barack Obama ruined NASA space exploration | TheHill
8 Mar 17 ~ By Mark R. Whittington
When Obama came into office, he did what a number of other presidents have done to determine their goals for NASA: he formed a presidential commission to study the space agency and come up with some recommendations.... The program, started by President George W. Bush, had been underfunded and had faced technical challenges for years. The commissions offered two alternatives. The first was Moon First, which would have focused America’s efforts on a return to the moon. The second was Flexible Path, which would have sent American astronauts to every destination besides the moon—the asteroids, the moons of Mars, and so on. Both options would lead to the holy grail of space exploration enthusiasts, a mission to Mars...The kicker was that both options would cost an extra $3 billion a year for NASA to execute. For the Obama administration, which was not shy about spending money in areas that it cared about, this price tag was too dear to bear.
Obama wasted eight years that might have been spent getting Americans beyond low Earth orbit. The Journey to Mars has been the Obama-Care of space exploration--expensive, unsustainable, and not designed to do what it is alleged to do. Part of the mandate of the current president to make America great again will be to turn that situation around and America back toward the stars.
Comment:
Obama turned the Russians into a billion dollar Uber for U.S. astronauts to get into space when he turned NASA into a Muslim outreach agency. The NASA administrator bizarrely stated that improving Muslim self esteem was one of the reasons NASA had been founded. Flying the Saudi prince was certainly an act of diplomacy and high politics. Just like letting the Russians, French and Japanese build most of what was supposed to be *our* space station.
If Progressive Marxist Socialist Dems want NASA to be the globalist warming institute of higher indoctrination, it's only because they actually believe that man controls the weather - and likely voted for the imbecile in chief twice - not willing to admit their contribution to the greatest failure of the Democratic Party.
Tragically, there are many aspects of science, psychology, politics, and even logic that are seen as 'make believe' by those incapable of grasping advanced concepts, or else by those who let their prejudices and hatreds betray their abilities to reason. These are the unwitting allies of those who hate science, exploration, equal opportunity, and progress.
Rather than side with Muslim and other extremists, as so many seem to be doing albeit inadvertently, I'd suggest examining the statements in context of our scientific and political goals, and from positive as well as negative ramifications . . . and see if you don't find yourself in some measure of agreement.
While I am impressed with some of our robotic accomplishments, there's still the argument that human explorers can do a day's worth of robotic work in about 10 minutes . . . plus not have to worried about delayed or compromised signals. In addition, humans 'notice' and 'discover' things that robots might easily miss.
The 'probe' in the example is much more likely to miss something that a human would catch. Until we can make much better robots, there should be room for both types of exploration. Indeed, there's always Hawking and others who argue that humans need 'backup' locations . . . just like data.
The problem in NASA is not just 8 years old. We tend to throw the bums out every eight years and get new bums. The new bum has spent the last few years trash talking the old bum and isn't very interested in continuing the old bum programs. Long term planning is all but impossible. We get a series of eight years plans which is not good science. So we spent $2B for the Superconducting Super Collider hole in Texas.
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