Obama has indicated he might look at NASA, and NASA's manned program. This isn't fair. Kennedy said we go to the Moon, we went to the damn Moon. Kennedy wasn't around, but we knew he wanted us to go to the Moon after he was shot, so we did. George W. Bush wants us to go back to the Moon and then to Mars. And he'll even be around to appreciate it! He'll say, "See? We did it! I knew we could!" Here's the rule: President says we go somewhere, we gotta go there. He's the President!
But there's a lot of people who say we don't need the manned space program any more. Stupid people. Question: how will we get people into space without the manned spaceflight program?
Never mind that robotics, computers and automation are able to accomplish space science at a small fraction of the cost because they're not fragile bags of water who need oxygen, water, food, air pressure and who crap and pee and breath out air which is poisonous to them. Never mind that space automation is actually better for our economy and our colleges. Those are details. You're being silly. Look at this list of all the things we have because of the manned space-flight program:
- teflon
- aspirin
- waffles
- Nebraska (the state)
- adult diapers
- big dish antennas (make your DirecTV dish look like a toy)
- North Dakota (another state)
- lots of movies about the manned space program
- tang (non-poon)
But even without all of that, what about the spiritual part of it. Here's what Ronald Reagan said when some astronauts died:
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God."
Don't you want us to touch the face of God? He was talking about the Challenger astronauts. Reagan was. I couldn't find a quote from God on google. They died when they crashed into the Pacific Ocean at like a bazillion miles per hour. Since then we've had the Columbia disaster where the astronauts were burnt up coming back to Earth. These dead astronauts are heroes. They died so that people could continue to go into space. If we don't keep going into space, they died in vain.
So Obama should support the manned space program and NASA. Whenever someone here on Daily Kos tries to tell me we don't need the manned space program any more, I have a surefire argument. Gets them every time.
Dude!
So when we go to Mars and everyone in mission control is going "w00t!", you helped pay for it, but you won't get to celebrate because you don't agree that we have to go there. Fail!