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Florida Group Wants To Make Space a 2016 Presidential Campaign Issue (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: According to a story on News 13, an Orlando TV station, Space Florida is working to make space a political issue in the 2016 presidential election. Thus far the campaign for the presidency has been dominated by more mundane issues such as the economy, illegal immigration, and the threat of terrorism. Space Florida, which is "the State of Florida's aerospace economic development agency," is said to be "working with three other battleground states to make sure America's space program is a part of the campaign for president." Presumably one of those states is Texas, which has lots of electoral votes
They won't have to work hard, considering "space" has been an issue for every election as long as I've been able to pay attention to elections.
Like four years ago......as soon as it was time for the Florida primaries, every candidate started talking about their space plan. After the Florida primary was over? Never mentioned again.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The snark is that it's a pretty transparent attempt to get more pork for their state. Florida, Alabama, and Texas are the three states with major NASA facilities, and there are a lot of contractors who work in those states to support NASA.
Space travel is important. But a group whose business depends on government pork is likely not the most impartial group to be delivering that message. Porking NASA is how we got the Senate Launch System in the first place; NASA doesn't really want it, but it's being forced upon them by senators who want to keep government contracts in their state.
But the GOP is in control of the purse strings and they want to de-fund even essential services. No way will they invest in the future without another space race. Our current enemies are terrorists who can't come close to racing against us.
No competition = no race = no funding for space.
The only way I could it happening is if we had first contact of some kind. So I put the odds at about a 100 million to one, against.
I'm more likely to win every single lottery and put all the funds toward a trips to mars.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I once worked for Rockwell-Collins in the states - I started there shortly after the NASA "incident". What incident? Apparently they were caught - after doing it for many years - billing everything to the shuttle, as a matter of corporate policy. Unlike most contracts Rockwell-Collins gets, there was no cap on the Shuttle project budget. So whenever any project ran over, they just billed the engineers' time to the Shuttle. ;)
NASA does some great stuff in terms of R&D and robotic exploration. But their culture is not a good matchup for developing launch systems, whether in-house or through contractors.
Hello from Sputnik 2. I am receiving you.
"Space travel and exploration are the future of the human species."
Oh, bullshit. Not for the next presidential term, not for the next century, probably not for the next millennium. If you think investment in space is more important than, say, ensuring the future habitability of Earth, you are foolish, or simply don't care, in which case you are psychotic.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Yes, because every time you privatize something, the costs go up. Businesses call it: profit.
I seriously wish all the fucking asswipes who hate this country, and society in general, would do humanity a favor and go fucking live on their own out in the woods till they realize that they ain't shit without society being there for them; fucking ungrateful little inbred brain-dead whiny bitches. What we need to do is kick all the worthless fucking trash politicians out of government who actively try to destroy our government from the inside. Fucking anarchists.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's