America's Space Program is Dying

Obama is redistributing the wealth again, and our space program, national security, and manned space science are sacrificed for the Democrat dependency classes living off taxpayer funds. Obama is obsessive in his rush to weaken and destroy America.

Here are some excerpts explaining this devious and evil plan.

Closing the New Frontier
by Charles Krauthammer
By the end of this year, there will be no shuttle, no U.S. manned space program, no way for us to get into space. We're not talking about Mars or the moon here. We're talking about low-Earth orbit, which the U.S. has dominated for nearly half a century and from which it is now retiring with nary a whimper.

Our absence from low-Earth orbit was meant to last a few years, the interval between the retirement of the fatally fragile space shuttle and its replacement with the Constellation program (Ares booster, Orion capsule, Altair lunar lander) to take astronauts more cheaply and safely back to space.

But the Obama 2011 budget kills Constellation. Instead, we shall have nothing. For the first time since John Glenn flew in 1962, the U.S. will have no access of its own for humans into space -- and no prospect of getting there in the foreseeable future.

Of course, the administration presents the abdication as a great leap forward: Launching humans will now be turned over to the private sector, while NASA's efforts will be directed toward landing on Mars.

This is nonsense. It would be swell for private companies to take over launching astronauts. But they cannot do it. It's too expensive. It's too experimental. And the safety standards for actually getting people up and down reliably are just unreachably high.

Sure, decades from now there will be a robust private space-travel industry. But that is a long time. In the interim, space will be owned by Russia and then China. The president waxes seriously nationalist at the thought of China or India surpassing us in speculative "clean energy." Yet he is quite prepared to gratuitously give up our spectacular lead in human space exploration.

As for Mars, more nonsense. Mars is just too far away. And how do you get there without the stepping stones of Ares and Orion? If we can't afford an Ares rocket to get us into orbit and to the moon, how long will it take to develop a revolutionary new propulsion system that will take us not a quarter-million miles but 35 million miles?
SNIP
At the peak of the Apollo program, NASA was consuming almost 4 percent of the federal budget, which in terms of the 2011 budget is about $150 billion. Today the manned space program will die for want of $3 billion a year -- 1/300th of last year's stimulus package with its endless make-work projects that will leave not a trace on the national consciousness.
SNIP
Fifty years ago, Kennedy opened the New Frontier. Obama has just shut it. source.

Obama Seeks to Weaken and Destroy America

Obama does not want the US supreme in any area that's worthwhile or of scientific and military significance. The 2011 budget contains $4billion for the thugs, crooks, and vote-rigging in Acorn. But we cannot to continue our space program even at a tiny level. Instead, Obama redistributes the wealth from the space program to the thugs and crooks and welfare bums. Once the funds are in handouts to these Democrat dependency classes, will they ever return to science and space exploration? Not at all likely.

Earlier Obama and his lap dog Sec. Defense Gates killed US supremacy in air superiority fighters. We are also the only major nuclear power failing to upgrade and improve our nuclear deterrent. Even France, the UK, Russia, and China see the need for a viable nuclear deterrent. Obama winks and nods as the Islamic Republic of Iran races to get one, but the US cannot. Again, our national security is de-funded to satisfy the growing dependency classes, the something for nothing Democrat Plantation.

National security is the president's main constitutional responsibility. How can we stand by and let him abrogate the responsibility?