Potential future president Barack Obama may have lost some votes among space enthusiasts this week. The democrat wants to take a fairly hefty amount of money away from the Constellation programme for manned moon missions and spend it on education.
“That would be very destructive. There’s so much more we could do for education by having a visionary space program than by just throwing it away into the educational bureaucracy,” Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society (and a former school teacher), told MSNBC’s Cosmic Log.
Last month Hilary Clinton released her space policy, which seems on the face of it less like bad news for Moon-and-Mars enthusiasts. However in a recent piece at The Space Review, Taylor Dinerman takes a close look and concludes she too is going to cut science and exploration budgets at NASA (via Space Politics).
Meanwhile Republican Mike Huckabee, the choice of Chuck Norris, has been making more positive noises.
Whether we ought to go to Mars is not a decision that I would want to make, but I would certainly want to make sure that we expand the space program, because every one of us who are sitting here tonight have our lives dramatically improved because there was a space program … [W]e need to put more money into science and technology and exploration.
Now, whether we need to send somebody to Mars, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what: If we do, I’ve got a few suggestions, and maybe Hillary could be on the first rocket to Mars.
Given that this is the man who recently remarked that “Science changes with every generation and with new discoveries and God doesn’t. So I’ll stick with God if the two are in conflict,” it’s intriguing to wonder what if anything evidence of the evolution past life on Mars would do to his belief structure once he’d paid the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to send people to examine it.
Not so positive is Republican Thomas Tancredo: “That’s why we have such incredible problems with our debt, because everybody’s trying to be everything to all people. We can’t afford some things, and by the way, going to Mars is one of them.” Easier to say when you have no hope of winning.
Image: Barack Obama