Some thoughts from Alan K. Henderson.
My general experience is that most conservatives who admire NASA don’t really know much about it.
5 thoughts on “Is NASA Overrated?”
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Some thoughts from Alan K. Henderson.
My general experience is that most conservatives who admire NASA don’t really know much about it.
Comments are closed.
You don’t have to deny that government has done a piss poor job opening up space to admire NASA. You just have to remember what it’s like to have been a kid. Granted, not a justification for spending billions on billions for any damned fool reason, but still…
Why blame NASA for the ISS when NASA wanted to build Moon bases and send humans to Mars?
The ISS was the politicians way of having a symbolic manned space program without the expense of having to send astronauts beyond LEO. Griffin wanted to end the ISS program after 2015 in order to fund beyond LEO missions but Obama and the Congress actually want to increase the ISS budget by a billion dollars annually while extending this expensive program for another decade.
As a very off-topic aside, Alan linked to an NRO article on stimulus and unemployment. I think the graph there is seriously flawed because the lower leg of the chart is total ARRA spending, not per capita spending, but let’s skip that. It shows massive funds being directed to various notorious, near-default states like California, Illinois, Michigan, etc. What’s going to happen to those states when the spigots get shut off next year by a partly Republican Congress?
I’ve never seen rational and well reasoned aerospace analysis at any of the neo con sites that I peruse, although I don’t visit them as much as I used to, being much more of a paleo these days. The Kos kids actually have reasoned discussions on space once in a great while, but I have to put up with the sludge that makes up 95% of their content.
Most conservatives just remember (or have inherited the memory from older cons) the thrill of watching the moon landings on tv and tie our space program (and thus NASA) to “when America was still great.” It’s emotional, not rational.
I knew a guy who went to work for NASA for a while. He wasn’t conservative — far from it — but it had been his lifelong dream. Anyway, he quit after about a year when he found out that instead of being in a holy temple to science working for NASA was just like working for any other government agency. He might as well have gone to work for the Post Office — they have all sorts of noble legends and slogans too.