Rant #185: To the Moon?

The race back to the moon appears to be over, at least for now, and at least in the foreseeable future and in my lifetime.

Instead of going back to the moon, the Obama Administration wants to invest $6 billion over five years in a commercial taxi to orbit. The idea is to give the private sector the impetus to take over routine flights into space.

About the only good thing that the previous administration of George Bush did while it was in power was to create the Constellation program, which had a goal of putting Americans on the moon once again. Somewhere in the range of $9 billion was spent on the program's development of a new crew capsule, the Orion, and a new rocket, the Ares I.

Well, that is all out the window now.

Sen. Richard C. Shelby, a Republican from Alabama, said it all. "The President's proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human space flight. The cancellation of the Constellation program and the end of human space flight does represent change, but it is certainly not the change I believe in."

I would have to agree. Scuttling the space program is putting shackles on further improvement in our ways of life on earth. Remember, without the space program, you would not be reading this rant, because compact, workable computers would not have come about without the space program.

Nor would cellular phones, iPods, and many, many other devices that are considered to be standards in our civilization today.

By basically killing the space program, the current administration is also setting back technology at least several decades. My kids won't see the advances I have seen over my lifetime because there won't be a platform for these advances.

I don't buy this latest move, and I hope that Americans see it as a poor decision.

Because that is what it is.