I'd feel a lot better about it if the current government (executive and legislative) budgeted money for the projects it was announcing (see, for instance, "No Child Left Behind"). I also worry that the current plans mean mothballing the shuttle fleet without a working replacement, putting us back to the period between 1975 and 1981.
The space program is one of the very few issues where I am at all positive about Bush, but even there the actions don't look as good as the words. The program he talks up sounds pretty good, but I look at what's actually happening, and I see the shuttles still grounded, the current NASA administrator insisting that we can't send a repair mission to the Hubble because it's 'too dangerous', and the two people house-sitting the space station while we dither about actually doing anything useful with it running out of food because of stupid policies that say we aren't allowed to pay the Russians to launch supply rockets and nobody actually doing anything to fix said policies. Oh, and the person rumored to be the new NASA administrator is a military accountant, not a scientist or even an astronaut.
Our space program can't hope to get anywhere until the people in charge are willing to admit that they can't make a rocket to LEO as safe as a trip to the corner store, and actually come out and say that yes, people will die if we keep going into space, and yes, it's worth that cost; obviously we have to make a reasonable effort to make it as safe as is practical, but once we've done all that we can reasonably do, we must go ahead and accept the risk.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2004-12-22 09:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-22 11:03 pm (UTC)B
no subject
Date: 2004-12-23 08:34 pm (UTC)Our space program can't hope to get anywhere until the people in charge are willing to admit that they can't make a rocket to LEO as safe as a trip to the corner store, and actually come out and say that yes, people will die if we keep going into space, and yes, it's worth that cost; obviously we have to make a reasonable effort to make it as safe as is practical, but once we've done all that we can reasonably do, we must go ahead and accept the risk.