Obama's Space Plan — a Conservative Argument

MarkWhittington writes "The Obama space proposal, which seeks to enable a commercial space industry for transportation to and from low Earth orbit while it cancels space exploration beyond LEO, has sparked a kind of civil war among conservatives. Some conservatives hate the proposal because of the retreat from the high frontier and even go so far as to cast doubt on the commercial space aspects. Other conservatives like the commercial space part of the Obama policy and tend to gloss over the cancellation of space exploration or even denigrate the Constellation program as 'unworkable' or 'unsustainable.'"

Comments

Re:libertarian

[cohensh]

Yes, because there is a shitload of private developed launchers that can bring cargo into LEO and beyond. Go libertarian!

SpaceX and Orbital immediately come to mind. Not to mention the Atlas rocket family.

Re:Space exploration is conservative.

[Low Ranked Craig]

perhaps you've noticed that a huge chunk of the previous stimulus package went into just that

No, I haven't noticed that unless by "huge chunk" you mean 3%. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aJAoR5GECKWo

Re:libertarian

[khallow]

How about 18 successful launches by the United Launch Alliance in 2009 (on the Delta II, Delta IV, and Atlas V platforms)? This includes several NASA and DoD payloads too.

Atlas doesn't count, it was designed by the US Air Force.

It was designed by Lockheed Martin.

Conservatives? Who cares?

[QuoteMstr]

Why are we even talking about what conservatives think? The GOP has amply demonstrated that it has no interest in governing the country in good faith. Their entire program is:

1. When in power: transfer as much wealth as possible to the very rich
2. When out of power: throw a wrench in the works to make the government look bad enough to vote the GOP back into power

Any conservative argument needs to be critically examined in light of the question, "how does this allow the GOP to continue its looting?" Just look at Chicago economics, Reagan tax cuts, Bush's imperialism, and flagrant anti-union rhetoric. It's not made in good faith.

Conservatives have no interest in the real welfare of the country. This little spat about NASA is merely a disagreement among the foxes about whether to go through the front or the back of the hen-house. It should be an awfully strong hint that the rest of the world is governed by parties to the left of even the left here, and is going better for it.

Can we please stop wasting our time and giving attention to these right-wing lunatics and their pernicious ideas?

Re:libertarian

[astar]

yah, the private banks do so well at giving us a future.

to go where ever we want, we need high-energy "rockets". Otherwise serious colonization does not work. In the 70s we were ready to go with nuclear drives. Now the russians are going to finally do it. I do not see a lot of private investment in anything really different. Pooh, we now all hear about the virtues of innovation, and as far as I can tell, this is something marketing is especially good at.

if you are a conservative type, something to consider is that India will be in LEO with men in 2012 and on rhe moon, with people, in 2020. oh, India is involved deeply with the russians on the nuclear drive.

on a more earthly thing, China currently has 64 high speed rail projects. 1000's of miles. The usa has 64 miles of medium high speed rail. Some people talk about high speed rail in the usa as capable of causing a 15% overall productivity increase.

and last I looked, 54 nuclear power plants were being built, almost all in asia. the usa has one, an old mothballed tva plant being brought up.

so who has the potential for a future?

anyway, here is a video entitled "the destruction of nasa" which is supposed to be very good

http://larouchepac.com/lpactv?nid=13392