It is very true that NASA is at the of the leash from Congress/Administration. Whenever a new President puts forth a new program, whatever that program is, the Congress must appropriate the funds to conduct that program. Making changes in plans every 4/8 years is difficult to manage. I'm frustrated as anyone who is interested in manned spaceflight but I'm only a single voice out of 360 million or so. I have good friends that say going back to the Moon is a dumb and COSTLY idea, and those funds should be spent on the problems we have currently. You know I seem to remember those same comments during the Apollo era.
How long do they propose fixing the world's problems is going to take?
10 years, 50, 100, 200, 500?
Ceasing human exploration, gaining knowledge and development due to problems our species will, inherently, always face: Is degeneracy.
A despotic world state where we as a species, blessed with a mind to dream, imagine and finally construct, will never aspire to our full potential but rather sublimate it to the imposition of equal impoverishment and misery of the life that came millions of years before us, and will after us.
I have lost faith in our ability to transcend the fate of all life from the past, by cementing the survival of our kind.
It is 2019, and 49 years since humans landed on the moon, the United States has no present capability to launch a manned spacecraft without sending their astronauts to what is essentially a quietly hostile enemy country, their space development programs have been effectively stalled for some 30-40 years, and significant portions of their population now believe that the world is flat, that evolution is not a biological reality, and that the world is 6000 years old and created by a jewish god.
50 years ago, the USA could have built a fleet of orbital nuclear battleships powered by the Orion propulsion design which would have ensured that the cold war would have been forced to end overnight, ensuring US technological and economic supremacy worldwide for likely centuries to come. This would have brought with it incredible advancements in science, physics and biological understanding.
We could have reached the nearest 3 or 4 stars and established a footprint throughout the solar system in that same span of time if science, engineering, and every other technology-intensive academic discipline were to take hold as cultural imperatives in substitution of overtly-gratuitous displays of religion persisting into today and along with it the collective appeal of embracing ignorance as a virtue by vectors of ideology and social philosophizing.
If NASA and fellow aerospace companies got even a fraction of the military budget it could have been used to build a potentially suborbital-capable fighter/interceptor/bomber platform for which the rest of the world’s engineering resources wouldn’t even begin to approach much less match for likely more than century to come.
Utterly pathetic. And I will call it nothing but.
