“...We simply no longer have the luxury of national wealth to pursue this sort of science...”
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I agree but at the same time we could have — if we were not funding massive government waste, hundreds of billions in illegal alien support, massive welfare rolls, some wars that have turned out to be a waste of life and treasure, and national suffering from a class of electorate that is ignorant, selfish and stupid that voted into our White House the worst possible anti-American Marxist that is destroying what we do have left and has spent 5 trillion generating huge totally wasted multi-generational debt.
When you compare all this to cost of our space program, in its most productive days, the cost of NASA and all its projects does not even appear on the radar. This is what makes me mad as hell!!!! But I never did expect THIS administration in particular to do anything but destroy our space program as part of an agenda to fund the forcing of socialism upon America and pull down all of our greatness.
Hope you can understand my frustration with what our own government has done, and continues to do to us as the once greatest nation on earth.
I can understand your frustration. I don’t like the situation any more than you do.
I’m very good with math and financial math, and I’m here to tell you that what you see happening in Europe is our fate very soon unless we U-turn out of this idiotic, mindless support of banking sector grifters as well as “free trade” policies which export 10’s of billions of dollars in real wealth out of the US every month.
Space will always be there. If we don’t go now or in five years, it will still be there in 20.
If we don’t get spending under control now, ASAP, within the next couple of years, the future of the US is not assured. Conservatives who really care about the future of the US will have to put aside their designs on public spending (military, space, etc) and start down a road of determining what we really need. We want a space program. We don’t *need* a space program.
We need a military. We don’t need a F-35 multi-role/multi-nation jobs program posing as a fighter.
And so on.
If fiscal conservatives want to really slash the budget, then we’re going to have to play fiscal aikido: The liberals will say “We won’t cut entitlements/welfare/etc until the military budget is cut.”
So write legislation to cut the projects the provide jobs in their districts - and cut them hard, hard, hard, then come back to the table and say “Done. Now show us what cuts you’ll make.” If they don’t come through, start hammering them in the press and at election time.
The endgame is drawing much closer, much faster than I’d previously thought. The Ivy League crowd in DC think that they’re oh-so-terribly smart are whistling past the graveyard, and anyone who says that they can turn this situation around without making the population feel some pain now is lying. They might not believe they are lying because they still believe the bromides about “growing our way out of it,” and “taxes and regulation can be slashed and the private sector will just bloom...” but the truth is, they’re lying. The only way to turn this around now will involve big, dramatic cuts, big changes in immigration, trade and domestic policy and even then, we won’t turn the situation around quickly.