More US jobs to be lost

Have just seen the news that the White House will be spending more of the 0.53% of the federal budget earmarked for NASA on 'Climate change'. My jaw dropped as I read the news that there will be no funding for the ARES and Constellation programmes which will be spent instead on 'fighting climate change'. Does the current US administration not understand basic economics? Don't they understand that projects which pioneer Space exploration has massive spin off potential, both in terms of employment and technology? Even India has a manned space program planned, yet the White house appears to be backing away from investing in manned exploration?

"We certainly don't need to go back to the moon," said one administration official. Yes you do, or you'll end up begging rides to the ISS from the Russians and Indians. Never mind nebulous hopes for a 'Heavy lift' platform. I thought that was the whole premise behind ARES. The Obama Administrations only alternative appears to be 'outsourcing' the space programme. Is this the 'Change' the US electorate voted for? Apparently so, because change is all they'll have left.

What would have happened if Columbus and Cabot had not obtained funding for their voyages to the riches of the new world? By not funding extraterrestrial exploration, the Obama administration threatens to put the USA, and hence the western economic sphere down in the economic doldrums for decades, picking up scraps from other's tables instead of making the running.

Well maybe people like Scaled Composites will step up to the plate and deliver. Maybe a private consortium will develop a 'better, stronger, faster' means of off world exploration. For myself, I doubt it. Miracles of technology aside, only Governments have the funding necessary to set mankinds metaphorical feet firmly on the road to the stars. Without that impetus, this dooms Homo Sapiens to being an evolutionary footnote, just another layer in the fossil record. We are an expansionist species. We must spread out or die out.

There is no net economic benefit from spending US taxpayers (or anyone else's) money on fucking totally discredited claims of anthropogenic climate change. The only 'green jobs' will be taxpayer funded, and that will take necessary investment capital which in turn creates employment for US citizens out of the system, even I understand that. FFS If what the surfacestations.org project indicates is true, then the claims of nought point whatever temperature change are completely unverifiable. The US temperature record alone is not reliable enough to say that global temperature is actually rising out of control, even by tenths of a degree. The biased siting of many Weather monitoring stations helps put all those prognostications of climate doom in doubt.

All we see happening are cycles that repeat the weather patterns of the 1920's and 30's. Any bloody idiot can verify that for themselves by checking out news sources from that period.

Clucking bell. Someone in the White House has been talking the stupid pills. When the USA needs all the economic clout it can muster, what it doesn't need is an administration which removes fuel from the economic powerhouse.

By verifiable example; 7,000 Jobs at the Kennedy Space Centre (Ironic that Kennedy was a Democrat) will be lost when the Shuttle program ends in September 2010. Other related industries will also have to shed workers. More people on the breadline, taking social security and contributing nothing in return. But what the hey, maybe those redundant space industry workers can get jobs with the Indian program, eh?

Just as a matter of interest; here is a list of spin offs directly attributable to NASA's space program.