With the Hubble Telescope already receiving the budgetary axe, the Halliburton connection (http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9774), and the funding, I think Bush's space initiative may be to NASA what "No Child Left Behind" has been to education.
President's NASA plans lack funding
In one of his most daring and longest-term plans to date, President Bush announced last Tuesday an outline that's out-of-this-world, both fiscally and otherwise, for the future of the space program.
If Congress agrees to Bush's "new course," the long-term focus of the nation's space program will shift from shuttle missions and the International Space Station to a new manned space vehicle that will lift off in the next decade; NASA's three remaining shuttles would be retired.
He wants America to make a return hop to the moon by 2020. (Oddly, that gives National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineers a much longer time to hash out details for a moon mission than President Kennedy did when he promised a man on the moon by the end of the '60s.)
Moreover, Bush called for an eventual manned mission to Mars as early as 2030.
And if high-end field trips outside earth's sphere of gravitational influence didn't command enough eyebrow raisings, the initiative calls for the stuff that afternoons of playing with Lego sets are made of: the establishment of a permanent moon base.
The price tag? Well, that depends on how you do your accounting: Bush asked Congress for a $1 billion budget hike for NASA over the next five years, just a fiduciary nudge compared to NASA's current $86 billion budget. But, the plan also calls for the reallocation of $11 billion from other NASA programs.
Still, big numbers and big plans aren't impressing many Americans, particularly in a recovering economy: More than half of respondents would prefer that the budget increase be spent on domestic programs, a recent Associated Press poll found.
Those Americans would presumably be displeased if even this short-term projection dramatically increased, as some Capitol Hill pundits warn.
"The first year after Kennedy announced the Apollo program, the NASA budget doubled," explained Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. "And in the second year it was doubled again. That's not realistic today. But 5-percent-a-year increases are not going to get us to the moon."
Nelson is more than a politician concerned about fiscal accountability, too -- he's the only current member of Congress who has flown in space.
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dailyemerald.com
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