Fly Me to the Moon Deficit
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What better time to announce a $104 billion "back to the future" moonshot boondoggle than in these post-Katrina days of "how are we going to pay for this" and "there's no fat left in the budget"?
The target date for the new moon landings is 2018, just about when the fraud of the Social Security "trust fund" will begin to be finally and irrefutably exposed. I wonder what kind of mood for mammoth "warm fuzzy feeling" federal programs we'll be in then.
There is no compelling geopolitical need (i.e. the Cold War), none whatsoever, for a new moonshot program, or even for any kind of deep space program at all.
It's not even clear that there would be any scientific value to a new moonshot program. Science needs a zero-gravity environment (i.e., the space station) for the current fields of inquiry far more than a low-gravity environment.
Even space travel itself won't really be advanced by the proposed "back to moon" program. Indeed, NASA is boasting that it will merely be cannibalizing parts from the space shuttles and "updating" basic multi-stage rocket design. "Think of it as Apollo on steroids," says NASA administrator Michael Griffin
No, I prefer to think of it as the deficit on steroids. $104 billion worth of steroids.
Carl Sagan summed it up best (I'm paraphrasing from a post-lecture Q&A I attended as a graduate student at Cornell): "We've been to the Moon. The Moon is boring."
It's also far too expensive, even for today's tax-and-spend Republicans.
More thoughts from Downtown Lad, California Yankee.
The target date for the new moon landings is 2018, just about when the fraud of the Social Security "trust fund" will begin to be finally and irrefutably exposed. I wonder what kind of mood for mammoth "warm fuzzy feeling" federal programs we'll be in then.
There is no compelling geopolitical need (i.e. the Cold War), none whatsoever, for a new moonshot program, or even for any kind of deep space program at all.
It's not even clear that there would be any scientific value to a new moonshot program. Science needs a zero-gravity environment (i.e., the space station) for the current fields of inquiry far more than a low-gravity environment.
Even space travel itself won't really be advanced by the proposed "back to moon" program. Indeed, NASA is boasting that it will merely be cannibalizing parts from the space shuttles and "updating" basic multi-stage rocket design. "Think of it as Apollo on steroids," says NASA administrator Michael Griffin
No, I prefer to think of it as the deficit on steroids. $104 billion worth of steroids.
Carl Sagan summed it up best (I'm paraphrasing from a post-lecture Q&A I attended as a graduate student at Cornell): "We've been to the Moon. The Moon is boring."
It's also far too expensive, even for today's tax-and-spend Republicans.
More thoughts from Downtown Lad, California Yankee.
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Posted by KipEsquire on
19 September 2005
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