NASA wants to do stuff with your money

NASA has biiiiiiiiig plans for your money. I think Bush was starved for ideas, especially since his presidency is going SO well. So, he tried to pull a John F. Kennedy and tried to sell another moon landing to the American people with NASA chomping at the bit for an excuse to ditch the shuttle and go back to safer, cheaper rockets.

Exsqueeze me? Haven't we already done that? Maybe he was so stoned or drunk during the entire 1960s, but that's pretty much what NASA was about back then: putting a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth, just like JFK said. Y'know...not because it's easy, but because it's hard...and it'd really show those dirty Commie Soviets. The last moon mission took place in 1972, and the United States has not launched people on board a rocket since 1975, when the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project conveniently used NASA's last Saturn 1B rocket. We haven't used rockets for manned space travel since. Nope. We still make and launch rockets, but they're strictly unmanned.

Then came the total fucking waste of time that was the shuttle program. Don't get me wrong...the shuttle is a kickass piece of kit. It's a brick with wings that flies in space when NASA lets it and usually gets people there and back in one piece when the NASA engineers aren't being complete idiots. But really...what is it there for? We didn't really need it to launch the space station; the Soviets launched Salyut and Mir without a shuttle. We launched Skylab without a shuttle. You don't need a shuttle to restock the space station, either; the Russians developed the Progress cargo ship for that, since they scrapped their shuttle program in the early 1990s and never actually had a manned shuttle flight. You don't need a shuttle to ferry people back and forth from a space station; the Russians have been providing transportation to and from the ISS courtesy of their Soyuz capsules since NASA grounded the shuttle fleet, and will have to continue to do so since NASA is just now publicly admitting that the shuttle's design is inherently flawed.

So...I can see the logic in redeveloping manned rockets. Flying the space shuttle to the space station is like driving a Winnebago to the 7-11; it is fit for the purpose, but it's a lot more vehicle than is actually needed. And let's be honest...the shuttle's cargo bay is too small for a lot of commercial satellites, and the shuttle rarely brings satellites back to earth for this reason. Plus, it's usually cheaper to trash a satellite, build a new one, and launch it aboard an unmanned rocket than it is to launch a shuttle full of bullshit experiments that'll repair the satellite in orbit. I agree with redeveloping American manned rockets. Absolutely.

However...I don't see any point in going back to the moon. Bush says it can be used as a staging point for Mars missions, but sending humans to Mars is pure hubris. I mean, it's pretty cool. NASA wants to build a moon base in preparation for sending people to Mars. That's neat in terms of what can be accomplished, but again...why? Why do we need to send people to Mars? NASA is going to have to work hard to sell this one to the American people. Developing the vehicles to travel to the moon is going to be extremely expensive, and of course it will just be another expensive exercise in chest-puffing if we abandon sending humans to Mars. We'll have to be in it for the long haul, which is going to mean that NASA needs not only the support of the American people (which, after killing fourteen astronauts and destroying two shuttles in 25 years, it does not have) but of successive American administrations, both Democrat and Republican, not to mention a Congress with constantly-shifting politics, loyalties, and pissed-off constituents who will certainly balk at the whopping price tag this program carries.

C'mon, NASA. Inspire us. I dare you.