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Some 50 years after the creation of NASA, with a long list of accomplishments, President Obama has decided to dial it back. In this National Review Online article, What he didn’t talk about is the moon, at least in any seriousness. “I just have to say, pretty bluntly here, that we’ve been there before,” Obama declared in front of an eerily quiet NASA audience. “There is a lot more of space to explore.”
Obama looks at the Constellation program, introduced by Pres. George W. Bush in 2004 with the goal of rocketing Americans back to the moon by 2020, and sees a problem he inherited, not a challenge to be met. Obama is axing the project a decade before the deadline, after $10 billion has been spent. “No one is more committed to manned spaceflight, to the human exploration of space, than I am,” Obama said. “But we’ve got to do it in a smart way. We can’t keep doing the same, old things.”
What about the thousands of NASA employees who will lose their jobs when the program goes under? The administration plans to channel $6 billion to commercial-spacecraft developers and cross its fingers that they hire the newly unemployed space workers. These firms launch rich folks into the clouds for weekend zooms around the Earth. Surely those posts are the aspiration of every first-class mathematician and aerospace engineer who grew up with eyes toward the sky.
In addition to freedom and liberty, the other things that stirs the human soul is the thought of adventure. The opportunity to stare into the unknown and then use our God-given ingenuity to figure out how to peel back the layers of the unkown, like on onion. The spin-offs of such adventures always lead to new innovation to improve human existence.
But there is the rub: freedom, liberty, adventure, innovation.....those are individual accomplishments, and in Obama's world-view there is no room for that. In Obama's world, Government provides, Government grants, and more and more, Government dictates.
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