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01/09/2004 Archived Entry: "Bush to moon and Mars"

"SOURCES" SAY BUSH IS ABOUT TO ANNOUNCE BIG SPACE PLANS. A permanent base on the moon. A manned mission to Mars.

It would be wonderful to see this as great news. But how strange. How utterly out of the blue. It reeks of spectacle to keep us little folk from becoming too restless about all the various "wars on this-n-that" and our bizarrely lurching-and-reeling economy.

And this is what you do when government's already growing twice as fast as it did during Clinton's day? And when the federal budget's already looking like the aftermath of a drunken credit-card binge? You come up with a big, flashy spending program that's literally out of this world?

Hey, guys. Just get out of our way and the brilliant entrepreneurs and explorers among us will get us up there without putting an even bigger tax burden on our grandkids' backs.

LATER: The Rocket Scientist has a different -- and somewhat more ominous take on this. Click more to read a real expert's POV:

This news of a new initiative to explore the moon etc is probably pretty bad news for us private space folk.

This has (as it did in the 60's) almost nothing to do with exploring space, but (IMHO) has much more to do with Red China.

The PRC has begun to loft things into space rather enthusiastically, lately. Large heavy things. The US military is gravely concerned about this....so much so that there are whole bunches of money-effort being expended on detecting and dealing with any threat whatsoever that might hurt our massive supremacy in space. It is about pulling the teeth of China by getting them to involve themselves in a face saving race to the moon and beyond. If the PRC is devoting their energy to going to the moon, then they will have less resources available to defeat our (US) multifarious space assets......and we have a LOT of them up there. Many many scenarios involving interference with our space assets by PRC are being explored.......they (the US) absolutely want to keep the high ground. ...

And of course Bush wants F*&^() NASA to do this....which will probably divert any remaining funds away from unmanned space exploration (which are FAR more cost effective). Bad enough to do this with extorted dollars, but to let the greasy-green scabrous bloated NASA monster handle it....groan........(puking into a handy trash can)

Posted by Claire @ 07:13 AM CST
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