Word: space
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...that day, President Obama announced his inexplicable decision to ‘realign’—read “scrap”—NASA’s mission to replace the space shuttle and return humans to the Moon by 2020, in his fiscal year 2011 budget...
...unifier, although it’s certainly had that effect: the new plan faces virtually unanimous bipartisan opposition across the Senate and the House. “Simply unacceptable,” said one Democratic Congresswoman; “[a] death march for the future of U.S. human space flight” a Republican Senator added. A former NASA administrator compared it unfavorably to a similar decision made by Richard Nixon, labeling it, “one of the most…strategically bankrupt…decisions in human history.” This is what you get when...
Obama claims to have scuttled Constellation in order to replace it with a partially privatized space program. But this is Washington doublespeak at its worst and nothing less than a cover for doing away with the program. Like national defense and fire departments, space exploration is at present a public good, optimally undertaken by governments. The private space industry has a very important role to play but it cannot and should not replace the role of government—the two are synergistic...
...shoulders as some of the [moon] astronauts [returned]…[he said] this is what America’s all about, we can do anything when we put our mind to it,” President Obama reminisced. “And that was what the space program described, that sense of possibility and always reaching out to new frontiers.” Apparently today’s American youth don’t need this sense anymore. The power of space exploration, however, is quite clear to China and India, who will now gladly take this opportunity...
Yielding the lead in space exploration to other nations doesn’t just look bad on television—it also has serious long-term repercussions for the nation. Space exploration has long been the source of many of the nation’s most capable engineers and scientists, and it is difficult to see how this decision will inspire more students to study math and science. This comes at a time when U.S. Ph.D.s in science and math are at historic lows (as President Obama has also pointed out). This is not just hyperbole; among those who have...