John Glenn: Space station wasted
Posted on Wed 21 Feb 2007 at 10:38 am PST. Filed under Politics.
“Glenn says it’s wrong to divert money away from the international space station. He supports the president’s moon and Mars goals but not at the station’s expense.”
I fully support Glenn on this. Bush has screwed up so many things that he tries to re-instate USA into a “glorified” status by asking NASA to sacrifice a goat and send astronauts to the moon and Mars. It was a purely “popularly political” decision he made as it bears no real merit right now to spend money for such difficult missions (plus, the moon mission is semi-useless too). And all that, at the expense of the ISS which is dangerously short-handed: the astronauts there have barely time to maintain the station and sleep, not to conduct any useful experiments.
3 Comments »
Personally, I think we ought to do all of it: really support ISS, and go to the Moon, Mars, etc.
The thing that’s screwed up is that most people seem to think that space travel is only about research, and that ISS is all about research and that going to Mars and back to the Moon isn’t.
Space travel is as much about potential exploitation as it is research. And, a lot of that research ought to be targetting ways to use space travel to our advantage.
The best research tool, on or off this planet, is a human being. The best reason to operate a space station in low-Earth orbit is as a fueling and maintenance depot for trips elsewhere.
The problem is billg, that there is not enough money to do all three things the RIGHT way. All of the 3 projects will experience resource shortages, because the reason they were ordered by Bush was for some political stand rather than being done on their right time.
Well, yeah, there’s not enough money to go around, because Bush is taking us into debt spending it in other, less useful, venues.
He’s funding the lunar effort by ending the Shuttle (OK with me) and rolling back ISS (not OK with me). It’s an effort to keep NASA’s budget relatively flat, since people tend to go ballistic about the comparatively small change we spend annually on NASA, just like some folks do about foreign aid, while ignoring the really big bucks we spend elsewhere. I’d rather see us cut down on the “elsewhere” spending and ramp up funding of the things I support.
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