Obama Refuses to Send Anyone Else to the Moon
President Obama is on a roll lately. He gave a sassy State of the Union and then he embarrassed House Republicans on TV and now he is agreeing with us that Space is Not Worth it.
Sort of! In Orszag's budget, NASA still gets $100 billion over the next five years, but the budget eliminates the Constellation program, which was supposed to replace the broken old Space Shuttles and send more men to the moon in 2020 (for NO REASON) as part of Bush's "let us live on Mars once I have destroyed this planet" space initiative.
In fact, the budget basically destroys NASA as a "sending dudes to space" organization and instead proposes that they make fancy technology and send astronauts to space on private ships and through international collaboration. People who love space, like Senators from Florida, hate this idea, so Congress will probably make sure NASA remains exactly the same: a tremendous waste of taxpayer money. (I bet you could buy a lot of health care for $100 billion!)