Remember, once upon a time, in a far away land (also known as a month ago), when NASA was supposed to be getting man back on the moon?  Do you also remember that the Obama administration cut the funding and the projects that would, in fact, get us back to the moon and started to turn NASA into a global-warming - er, excuse me, climate change - monitoring agency? 

Apparently, this has a few of the fine congresscritters up on the hill a bit miffed.  With NASA.  Not the administration's budget, oh, no, but with NASA.  Yep.

NASA needs to go somewhere specific, not just talk about it, skeptical U.S. senators told the space agency chief Wednesday.

 President Barack Obama's proposed budget kills the previous administration's return-to-the-moon mission, sometimes nicknamed "Apollo on steroids." That leaves the space agency adrift without a goal or destination, senators and outside experts said at a Senate Commerce science and space subcommittee hearing, the first since Obama unveiled his new space plan this month.

 On top of that the nation's space shuttle fleet is only months away from long-planned retirement, an issue for senators from Florida, where NASA is a major employer. And while the new NASA plan includes extra money — $6 billion over five years — for private spaceships and developing new rocket technology, NASA shouldn't be just about spending, the senators said. It should be about John F. Kennedy-like vision.

Um, Earth to dumbasses:

It's been one fucking month since Mr. "I am not a socialist!" President cut the funding, changed the vision, and fucked up years of plans, spending, and development on the very technologies that you are now whining about.  One fucking month.  Having a "vision" is great, but when funding is cut, projects are cancelled, and expectations are changed, vision gets fucking cloudy.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's been nearly 40 years since we got a fucking human being any further than the fucking ISS.  The technologies that we were developing to get a fucking human being out of fucking orbit were cut in Teh Won's fucking budget plan.  I'm not a damn rocket scientist, but that looks like one big ass-rape without lube for getting anywhere, with or without some Camelot vision. 

I hate to break it to everyone, but you can't have your cake and eat it, too.  You can't tell NASA to fuck itself on Constellation and Aries and still expect NASA to get us wherever the fuck it is you want NASA to get us in the next five g'damned minutes.  Look, I'm a fan of money going to the private sector to encourage private development of space travel.  But, at the same time, you cannot simply rely on that to get us there and then demand that NASA have a timeline!  How do you fucking outsource something with zero specifics and still expect someone to give you a precise estimate of when that work will be done?

Fuck.  Not only does the average congresscritter fail to do their job correctly, they fail to properly critique others handiwork, as well.

Posted by: Ember at 02:09 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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