Ever wonder what $6 billion worth of smoke looks like?
You’ll see on until Tax Day April 15 at the president’s Space “Summit”. Skip the moon we’re adding some pocket change to the funding to zoom right out there to the…well, to the moon! And, oh yes, the asteroids, because that’s a spacey sounding word.And then evennnnntually…back to Mars. Mm hm. It would be back to Mars because as I’m sure the administration’s crack space advisers have told the summit organizers, Mars’ orbit is closer to Earth’s than the Asteroid Belt.
The President’s ambitious new strategy pushes the frontiers of innovation to set NASA on a more dynamic, flexible, and sustainable trajectory that can propel us on a new journey of innovation and discovery.
Catch that? Pushing the frontiers of innovation to propel us on a journey of…innovation!
And of course it all must be sustainable. A word that is already has the early lead as the decade’s most meaningless.
Is it political at all? You bet your retro rockets it’s political.
Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, like Houston’s Johnson Space Center and Alabama’s Marshall Space Flight Center, face thousands of threatened layoffs from Obama’s decision to end space shuttle operations at the end of the year and scrap NASA’s $108 billion back-to-the-moon Constellation program.
But it is the swing state of Florida that is getting the president’s attention, not perennially GOP states like Texas and Alabama.
“The Obama administration could care less about offending Texas politically,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.
