Free Republic

On Sunday The HoustonChronicle,which in 2008 broke a 44 year tradition of backing Republicans and endorsed Barack Obama, endorsed Mitt Romneyfor President in 2012:>>>Like so many others,we were captivated by the Illinois senator's soaring rhetoric and energized by his promise to move American politics beyond partisan gridlock and into an era of hope and change.It hasn't happened. Four years later,PresidentObama's deeds have failed to match his words,much less his specific vows to cut the national debt by half and bring the nation's unemployment rate to 6 percent. As Texans,it is a particular vexation that this president's attitude toward the interests...

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden dismissed rumors that the future of U.S. space exploration is in jeopardy and rejected speculation that his agency has no plans for future human spaceflight. “Those who perpetuate that myth only hurt the space program,” Bolden told businessmen, academics and journalists Tuesday afternoon at the National Press Club. “Such talk undermines our nation’s goals at a very critical time,” he said. “The truth is we have an ambitious series of deep space destinations we plan to explore and we are hard at work exploring the hardware and the technologies to get us there.” ....“If you look...

Despite the news and pictures from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, America's once great space program is on life support because we no longer have a serious manned space exploration program....And the Obama Administration's unimaginative and amateurish vision for space exploration -- even if successful -- will not revive the dying program. It merely follows the disturbing pattern of the Solyndra scandal, funneling tax dollars to Obama donors and fundraisers. [SNIP] ....SpaceX collects tax dollars so that it can learn how to build and develop something that other companies were doing a generation ago. It is curious that SpaceX is now...

[snip] NASA plans to announce the heavy-lift plan, formally known as the Space Launch System or SLS, around the time of the July 8 launch of the final space shuttle flight. The decision should keep America’s renowned spaceflight program running, saving the jobs of many of NASA’s hard-to-replace engineers. Shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach spoke frankly about the space effort's future in remarks he made to his launch team at Kennedy Space Center this month, during preparations for the shuttle Atlantis' program-ending mission."The end of the shuttle program is a tough thing to swallow, and we’re all victims of poor...