NASA trouble
This first story is a week old, but still totaly accurate:
NASA is facing a critical deadline on whether to retire the space shuttle fleet, however, it still lacks an agency chief to make the $230 billion decision.
According to one presidential expert, NASA is so far off the White House radar, it might as well be on Pluto.
“As each day goes by, the need for these decisions becomes greater and greater, and the absence of an administrator becomes more and more an issue,” said John Logsdon, a member of the NASA Advisory Council and former Obama campaign advisor.
And more problems ahead:
So let’s look at some of the decisions that are (or aren’t) being made in this climate:
“It is time to reconsider whether we want to go ahead with the Constellation program to place a base on the moon. Many of us in the space community would be eager to recreate the thrill of Apollo. However, from the public’s standpoint, going back to the moon in 2020 would not invoke the same sense of awe and inspiration it did 51 years earlier when it was a seemingly impossible task.”
The old men who run NASA are still stuck in the Apollo mentality. We’ve already gone to the moon out of hubris once, and after planting a flag and hitting a golf ball around, we couldn’t remember any good reason to stay there. Now they propose skipping the moon in favor of thrills and out-of-touch notions of inspiration.
Building a spacefaring civilization takes more than thrills and flag-planting. It takes the hard work of learning how to live and work in space. We’re not getting anywhere else for any useful purpose if we don’t use the moon as a stepping-stone.
Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on NASA alone.
