If NASA were dismantled, who would carry out their critical functions of climate propaganda and making Muslim countries feel better about their failure to accomplish anything over the last 500 years?
Harrison Schmitt, a former U.S. Senator from New Mexico and Apollo Astronaut, says although “NASA’s had a good 50-year run,” it’s now time for a change.
Schmitt is proposing to start from scratch, by taking NASA’s deep space exploration efforts and putting them in a new agency. That agency, which Schmitt has dubbed the National Space Exploration Agency, or NSEA, would focus on missions to the moon and beyond.
Schmitt was a lunar module pilot for Apollo 17, the last Apollo mission to land men on the moon. During a Saturday interview with Fox News, Schmitt said he’d like to see more of the “youth and vigor” that NASA had during the Apollo missions.
“After 50 years NASA has gotten old, it has become more bureaucratic,” said Schmitt. “It’s time I think to take the critical national security functions and geopolitical functions out of NASA and put them in a new agency.”
Schmitt added that in its current state, “NASA does not have the focus it needs to contribute to the exceptionalism of America and to the geopolitical strength that we must have in the world.”
NASA is pork. Unless the new agency guarantees as much, it won’t see the light of the day.
He makes a good case, I doubt in the current political climate of fiscal austerity will allow for any “new” government agencies. Especially if it is about space exploration and not something with immediate value.
What NASA is currently doing has no immediate value. That goes for most all scientific research paid for by taxpayers these days and for the last 20 or so years.
In my view, this is wrong-headed thinking. We need a space program because I think it contributes to the exceptionalism of America.
Ending the space program just makes us weaker and contributes to the dismantling of this country that has been going on for at least 3 decades.
We just have to make sure the space program focuses on space and not on climate change or other pet social projects of the left.
Kramer,
did you read the post? That is pretty much what he is saying.
It’s time to let the entrepreneurs take over. All these rich silicon valley and Internet wiz kids should be getting all that NASA money to create lean and mean robust solutions. Now it supports a massive paperwork bureaucracy that the shuttle program created, and more and more if it is now AGW corruption too. We need to get rid of a dozen or two federal agencies altogether, especially the DEA which has us stuck in a permanent prohibition era crime culture. Prestige does not come from twice in a row exploding AGW falsifying satellites and Mars rovers that crash due to the Metric system, but from what free citizens create and do for themselves. NASA couldn’t even figure out how to make a carbon fiber fuel tank work, as Burt Rutan is making entire rockets out of the stuff!
BTW, though Harrison is hated on by greenshirts, they simply ignore the others who just as strongly bash AGW: http://oi52.tinypic.com/2d8qg5t.jpg.
Nik,
yes, certainly private entrepreneurs are structurally much more capable of creating new unthought of solutions to problems.
you mean those PRIVATE companies that built faulty rockets for the AGW falsifying satellites? Yes this myth that government solutions are always worse and more bureaucratic than private enterprise is very popular. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, and applying appropriate solution using the means best suited for the particular problem needs non ideological approaches. But both the right and left are so caught up in their fantasies that they can’t accept the idea that the enemy can do anything right.
who is Philip?
TonyD:
Dou mean the rockets whose only two failures were the shroud separations on two NASA research satellites that would have falsified the AGW theory just like the Jasons are doing.
Yeah, who is Philip ?
Mike,
yes, those rockets are the ones I am referring to.
Amazing Coincidence! YES?
This is Phillip:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Chapman
Right from WIKI!
Mike,
if it is NOT a coincidence it is clearly conspiracy and both you and STeve INSIST it is not that. Or have you changed your minds?
It is a conspiracy that everyone thinks their belief system is the best one. Everyone in the world got together and organized that conspiracy.
Steve,
I agree to a large extent, but blowing up a billion dollars worth of satellites to protect your belief system is on a different level.
WTF are you talking about?
TonyD:
I do not care what happened to the satellites as I considered both a waste of money whether the were destroyed or had completed their so called missions.
It was called equipment malfunction and could well have been. Just an odd coincidence.
Tony D, The satellites did not falsify the data NASA did!
john,
you misunderstand. the satellites were blown up so that they wouldn’t be allowed to prove that AGW is a scam. See the scientists involved KNEW the sats would reveal the truth Steve has been promoting so they had nASA spend hundreds of millions to have them designed and built and then made sure to blow them up so they couldn’t send back any data
It’s time I think to take the critical national security functions and geopolitical functions out of NASA and put them in a new agency.”
What a radical idea!!
Or as Kennedy would not have said, but President Peanut might :-
” We choose to adjust temperature records and do the other things, not because they are hard but because they are easy.”
You would think a mission to Mars would create real interest in the space program. Maybe there is something of value there that could make it worth the cost.
Should have happened about 1980 .
I hope I live to see it.
I think that ultimately ( who knows how long?) its value will be realized as a place to go. Outpost, colony, biodome, whatever.
Once there, resources known to exist in asteroids and on farther moons will be in reach.
NASA represented everything I loved about the US and everything that I, being English, was jealous of. They used to do the things we couldn`t afford to do anymore. There was an Eddie Izzard sketch along these lines.
Let us divert all the money from wind mills and get to Mars!
Mars could be nearer and easier than most people think.
I have wondered about that. there have been some science fiction stories that considered this possibility. I think the issue is that it isn’t Mars itself. Tantalizingly close but still unreachable, as far as manned flight is concerned. For non-manned flight it makes a tremendous amount of sense