THE HUMAN SPACEFLIGHT BLOG: From the Space Shuttle to Beyond

According to NASAWatch.com, presidential candidate Barack Obama stated that his education plan—if he is elected—will involve diverting funds from the Vision for Space Exploration and delay NASA’s Constellation program (which involves developing and launching the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle) for five years. Let’s see... There’s already a projected five-year gap between the retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 and the first manned mission by Orion in 2015... That means the U.S. will be relying on Russia to send our astronauts into space till 2020 (which is when we would have returned humans to the Moon). Do the math, and that’s a 10-year absence where America isn’t gonna have its own manned spacecraft to send its own astronauts into orbit. As an advocate of the space program (in case you didn’t notice from most of the Blogs on this page), this is totally freakin’ unacceptable.

Overlooking Hilary Clinton's presumably positive stance on human spaceflight, I'm probably not gonna vote Democrat in 2008. Additional reasons would be that I wasted my vote on this losing side in 2000 (to the dull, but Nobel Prize-winning vice president) and 2004 (the bunny suit-wearing flip-flopper from Massachusetts). Obama's plan is hypocritical. And foolish. He wants to motivate kids to get more interested in math and science, and yet he wants to cut funding to the one government agency whose work is the epitome of math and science being used to the fullest. Good one, dude. I was thinking about voting for him until I read about this nonsense. Politics piss me off.



UPDATE: Found this interesting tidbit on a message board:

"Just a note on survivability of a program beyond a President's term...ISS (the International Space Station) started under Reagan in 1984 and has survived—albeit not without change and compromise—through four presidencies, ten Congresses (a "congress" officially lasts two years) and 24 attempts to kill it in the Congress along the way. It's just not as simple as an initiative of a single presidential term...which is why the Congress "adopted" it as "national policy" in the 2005 NASA Authorization Act...so it wouldn't be tied to the president alone.

Obama, if elected, could propose diverting funds from Constellation to education, and the Congress could simply tell him "no." They are the ones that ultimately decide where the money goes; the president, whoever he or she is, only requests a budget."

Hm- That makes me feel a whole lot better. If you overlook the fact Congress is currently controlled by the Democrats.