Discovery still a go

NASA serves a purpose; space flight is not only something for us to dream about in our luxury, but also something to think about in terms of our national security. You could easily make a justification that government involvement in space travel is an extension of the Fed’s responsibility to protect this country. If my tax dollars will go to anything, I would prefer it would be on things like the shuttle programme and upgrading B-52′s.

Yesterday was Discovery’s third try, and the third time I woke up early to watch the countdown (I live on the West Coast). I too was struck by the Sheehan comparison and wrote a blog about it ( ).

We actually spend .07% of the Federal Budget on NASA, which is a crime. The President saw no problem funneling money to Katrina ‘survivors’ to the tune of at LEAST 2 billion in fraud, he gave money to the families of 9/11 victims and thinks that our tax dollars are just deposits into a credit union that he holds the withdrawl slips to.

It makes me SICK, frankly. How any of these acts helps America stay secure financially or physically I don’t know. Lets create more entitlements, lets give out ‘credit cards’ to survivors of a national disaster and let them buy beer and lap dances with them; and then foreign newspapers can laugh at us when it comes to light.

How this type of stupidity in spending will do anything other than bankrupt the country and give the Democrats an excuse to justify a tax increase I don’t know. To term it counter productive is to be kind.

China is on its way to the moon, folks. They’ve put someone in orbit and they don’t care what the cost is- human or otherwise- and we have no problems with funding them, in the form of the ubiquitous ‘goods made in China’. It’s absolutely shameful, and I’m just sick of it.

The reason we’re not on Mars, we’re not on the moon is because of entitlements. After the first successful moon mission there were cries of ‘how can we keep spending this much money on space when there are poor people in America’? Nixon had tentative plans on his desk for a Mars mission using NERVA rockets; it would have landed on the red planet in 1985; how different life would be today. The public support flagged because of the perceived dearth of government handouts for the underprivileged, helped on it’s way, of course, by the Democrat party which had by that time moved away from the Democrats of JFK’s ilk.

We will never completely solve world hunger; there will always be people somewhere who need help who don’t get it when they need it. We should never allow something like that to be a roadblock to greater things; we’ll just end up sitting here, waiting for Godot, to the peril of us all. We will never get meaningful research and funding in to NASA as long as the President- and Congress- treat our tax dollars as their own personal entitlement, to award- and reward- people and communities as they see fit. Again, this is to the detriment of our country, our security and the finances of all tax payers.

The moon, Mars, THEY are the things that preserve mankind if an asteroid hits or al-Qaeda gets a closetful of nukes. Moving towards them makes us a better country, as we focus collectively on a positive, difficult goal; it feeds our souls. It increases our knowledge of medicine, the universe, weather; the benefits are nearly limitless.

You could see all of this promise yesterday, as Discovery’s CDR, sitting on top of millions of gallons of fuel, waiting to get hurled in to space, responded to Mission Control:

“I can think of no better place to be than here, on the Fourth of July.”

linlithgow on July 5, 2006 at 2:14 PM