Posted on 01/02/2009 11:21:52 AM PST by Sudetenland
Boy this ought to set the Liberals who voted for Obama off.
Apparently there is serious talk coming from the Obama camp of merging NASA's civilian space program with the pentagon's military space program.
No doubt the folks at NASA are in a tizzy over this proposal. Many of them are the ivory-towered elitist academic types who see patriotism and politics (except for Global Warming) as being beneath them.
Bringing the military into the picture will greatly offend the sensibilities. Of course I'm sure that the hard-headed military pragmatists are just as thrilled at the prospect of dealing with some of NASA's prima donnas. It's a match made in Washington D.C. Oh what fun!
(Excerpt) Read more at houstonconservative.com ...
ping
Ughh! Grammar. ...an Idea for which the Time has Come?
Looks like an excuse to gut the NASA budget to me.
Under Obama, I see this being a bad idea.
Otherwise, I’d say this is an interesting prospect, and it might FINALLY encourage pushing a space weapons program into high gear.
UFO conspiracy groups have long claimed that NASA was controlled by the military.
Now they can cut funds to nasa thru the reduction of funds to military without taking the heat for it.
Obama says he’s going to kill the Ares program. Something JFK would never do. What do you think about that Princess Caroline?
“Obama says he’s going to kill the Ares program”
I read that there is speculation that Obama will try to can the Ares 1 program and use the delta or atlas rockets for manned space flight.
It might be a good idea to shutdown NASA. They seem to have problems building rockets... and that’s their business... Maybe they just need a bailout.
Shutting down NASA by forcing a merger with the USAF is Obama’s “nuclear option” for dealing with a recalcitrant NASA Adminstrator. I believe it’s an idle threat for the reasons cited by others on the thread — basically that neither the NASA people nor the Pentagon types will be in favor of it.
Its a dumb idea. As a civilian agency, NASA doesn’t traffic in National Security secrets. The Pentagon has a boatload of them. For one thing, I suspect many UFO sitings are real— piloted by sentient, humanoid creatures who wear Air Force Academy rings. Merging NASA into the Pentagon would do damage to both.
If they want to merge NASA with something, merge it with the European Space Agency, that would save a lot of money and stop redundant efforts (aren’t the Europeans still putting up their own GPS system?).
Heck, include the Canadians and we can put it under NATO and physically base it in Canada. The Canadian space agency headquarters is between Montreal and the New York state line. The ESA guys can move from Paris to Quebec, the NASA guys move from Texas to New York.
Thanks for the ping. This looks like a proposal to gut both NASA and DoD by merging and reducing their space programs.
Anyone who thinks that the NASA launches are not all scrubbed, cleared, and endorsed by the military before they even get near a launch pad has noodles for brains.
There are various points to this...political and non-political. First, a growing amount of NASA’s budget is for environmental purposes...which the political figures grasp as being concrete and not likely to be cut....but with Pentagon leadership...they could force the funds to be fully explained and probably shifted into realistic projects, rather than bio-gravy projects. Second...the Pentagon is focused on the future and tend to have the better project managers (at least some folks believe that). Third...all of China’s projects are handled via their military system, period. It doesn’t matter if its recon or space exploration...the military guys make the decisions involved. Finally, we come to a minor episode involving Mr. Hansen of NASA and a meeting of the minds with the Pentagon. The prime individual pushing environmental policy for the US government is NASA’s own Hansen. Can you imagine a meeting where a couple of Pentagon generals engage him on a topic and demand he explain facts...and he starts to stumble? These guys tear up junior officers just for one goof-up....and Hansen will likely find himself in a pit of vipers when dealing with the Pentagon.
The “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” come to mind when I think of Senator Caroline...
I don’t have a problem with merging the programs in the abstract, but I suspect this is just a backdoor attempt to cut spending on research and space exploration generally speaking just to give them more funds to dump into the welfare state. I can’t support that.
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