Krauthammer Got it Wrong

I don't say this lightly. I have the utmost admiration and respect for Charles Krauthammer. He is a gifted thinker and has a way with words that is virtually unparalleled. The man can turn a phrase like no other. I don't always agree with Charles, but on those few occasions that he drifts from orthodoxy, which is to say, whatever I believe to be true, his reasoning for it is always well thought out.

I direct your attention to today's Quote du jour, taken from his best selling "Things That Matter":

"It's hard to blame this state of affairs on a fickle public. Blame also belongs to the idiot politicians who decided 30 years ago to abandon the moon and send us on a pointless and endless journey into low-Earth orbit. President Bush has sensibly called an end to this nonsense and committed us to going back to the moon and, ultimately, to Mars. If his successors don't screw it up, within 10 years NASA will have us back to where we belong - on other worlds."

-Charles Krauthammer, Aug. 3, 2007

That was written seven years ago this month. Raise your hand if you seriously think we will return to the Moon or go to Mars in the next three years, with our space program focused more on Muslim self esteem than going where no man has gone before.

Can you see his error? Can you see what was unfathomable and unthinkable in 2007?

 If his successors don't screw it up

He used the plural: "successors". In retrospect, how could he have known that it would not take more than one successor to "screw up" and decimate the space program?

Because he is a man of integrity, he allowed this glaring error to be republished in his book. It only took one successor to George W. Bush to screw up the space program (along with the economy, race relations and foreign affairs) and deny us access to the heavens. Unless you consider the outrageous amounts we pay one of our biggest geopolitical enemies to ferry us to the space station, at their whim, which, hamstrings us to an extent in standing against their earthly aggression.

In retrospect, I can see how Charles could have made the error. Few people, even those who were certain that Obama would be disastrous for our country, could fully envision the magnitude of that disaster. Who knew?

Cross posted at LCR

Twin Towers Smoke Visible from Space 9/11/01

Construction Begins for Newest Goodyear Blimp

"Iconic airships will become larger, faster, more maneuverable..."

AKRON, Ohio, March 22, 2013 – The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company announced today that it has begun construction of the first of a new generation of airships to replace its fleet of world famous blimps.

The new Zeppelin LZ N07-101 airship, manufactured by Germany’s ZLT Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik, will be assembled at Goodyear’s Wingfoot Lake Hangar near Akron, Ohio. An agreement with ZLT Zeppelin to supply Goodyear with the new airships was announced in May 2011.

Relatively low tech Goodyear blimps have been flying since 1925. In a related story, the space shuttle, admittedly higher tech, took its first orbital test flight in 1981. Operational flights began the next year. The shuttle was discontinued in 2011. The next generation of shuttles is scheduled for... scheduled for.... Wait! Don't tell me! The next generation space vehicle of the preeminent leader of the exploration of space, is scheduled for... scheduled for... aw, nuts!

Forty Years Ago, Man Walks on Moon - 7/20/2009 (Updated)

(republished from July 20, 2009)

In the history of flight, it was only sixty-six years from Kitty Hawk to "The Eagle has landed". Man went from a short powered flight to landing on the moon.
Forty years ago, the future looked limitless.



Had the last forty years proceeded apace with the first sixty-six years of flight, where do you think would we be today?


Updated: With the passing of Neil Armstrong, we have lost one of our true pioneers. There was no guarantee that they would even return from this truly historic mission. Neil Armstrong knew and accepted this. He was willing to die for his country if need be. Literally hundreds of things could have gone wrong. So high was the expectation of failure, that William Safire even wrote a speech for Nixon in case Armstrong and Aldrin were stranded on the moon.

Our current president, the one who has largely dismantled and repurposed NASA for Muslim public relations, has chosen to honor the memory of the late Neil Armstrong with... a picture of himself! Because after all, it's not so much what Armstrong achieved so much as it it The One offering flowery oratory! Stay classy, Narcissist-in-Chief!

NASA Launches New Obama Class Re-entry Vehicle

In what appears to be a near perfect metaphor for the space program under President Obama, NASA took to the skies over California...in a rented zeppelin.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- It's not every day that NASA descends on your backyard, hunting for clues to extraterrestrial life. But that is the drama unfolding this week in and around the community of Lotus, along the south fork of the American River in El Dorado County. Scientists from NASA and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute are hunting for pieces of a meteorite that plunged to Earth on April 22.

There's gold in them thar hills, but recently, the hunt has been for nuggets of nickel and iron. Fragments of the meteor which fell over California and Nevada with a big bang, April 22nd, are said to be worth around $1000 a gram. One lady, walking her dog the day after the meteor fell, found a 17 gram fragment in her local park. Professional meteorite hunters told her to wrap it carefully and put it in a safety deposit box. NASA's space exploration has been sharply curtailed, but if some of it falls out of the sky, NASA can always rent a zeppelin to look for it.

Why don't we call that "Plan B".
Cross posted at LCR, Say Anything.

WTF Without NASA, Mr. President?

April 2010, Obama was lying through his teeth talking to NASA employees, hoping to bamboozle them into voting Democrat, no doubt, in the midterm elections. From the BBC:

Barack Obama says it should be possible to send astronauts to orbit the planet Mars by the mid-2030s and return them safely to Earth. The US president made the claim in a major speech to staff and guests at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. He was laying out the details of his new policy for the US space agency.

Forget the moon, says Obama! We're aiming for a Mars mission! So, imagine my surprise to read this today:

In its budget submitted to Congress on February 13, the Obama administration zeroed out funding for NASA’s future Mars-exploration missions. The Mars Science Lab Curiosity, currently en route to the Red Planet and the nearly completed small MAVEN orbiter, scheduled for launch in 2013, will be sent, but that’s it. No funding has been provided for the Mars probes planned as joint missions in 2016 and 2018 with the European Space Agency, and nothing after that is funded either. This poses a grave crisis for the American space program.

One last orbiter and then...no funding whatsoever? How will this further your announced goal of manned missions to Mars? Was this just another in a long line of promises with an expiration date, Mr. Obama? Another line in a speech pandering to whatever audience you were in front of because it sounded good at the time?

It used to be a common rhetorical question, "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we do ______?" My question is, if the government can funnel million of dollars to failing solar companies like Solyndra, that they know will fail, and millions of dollars for overseas companies to make electric cars and batteries, why can't we put a man on the moon any more?

When Obama talks about "Winning the Future", he's talking about future elections, not the future of our country. WTF.

He was laying (ab)out the details of his new policy for the US space agency.

There! Fixed it for you, Mr. Obama!

Update : I didn't think of it before (second cup of coffee hadn't kicked in), but in line with the political cartoon, maybe Mars won't be the only "Red planet"?

Cross posted at LCR, Say Anything.

Sic Transit Gloria Americanus?

I wasn't planning on writing about this today, but the fading glory of our space program moves me to write. In 1977, Jerry Pournelle wrote about the "2007 expedition to Ceres". The old Buck Rogers TV show spoke of the "last of NASA's deep space probes in 1987". The last?? when was the first???

Robert Heinlein spoke of the expectation that many of us had growing up of the inevitability of space travel. In 1949, he wrote in the preface to "The Man Who Sold the Moon":

" (the stories)...are of the "What-would-happen-if" sort, in which the "if", the basic postulate of each story, is some possible change in human environment latent in our present day technology or culture. Sometimes the possibility is quite remote; sometimes the postulated possibility is almost a certainty, as in the stories concerned with interplanetary flight."

Did you get that? In 1949, R.A. Heinlein considered interplanetary flight "almost a certainty".

How did we get from the first Model A Ford to the first walk on the moon in forty two years and from the first walk on the moon to the last flight of the shuttle program in exactly the same time?

And perhaps, more importantly, how do we get back?

Cross posted at LCR, Lady Cincinnatus , Say Anything.

This Last Week's Poll

This Last Week's Poll, "The Last Space Shuttle Lifted Off Friday:" (check for "Yes")

Should the program have been discontinued? (0%)

Should it be replaced with something else? (45%)

Should that replacement have been in place before retiring the shuttle program? (75%)

Will the discontinued shuttle program add to unemployment? (40%)

Is Obama's talk of "going to Mars" simply empty rhetoric in light of his gutting and his redirection of NASA? (70%)

Will the private sector be able to replace NASA in maintaining America's lead in space exploration? (30%)

Multiple choices and Obama's crack budget office accountants may account for totals greater than 100%

Thank you for your participation!
Not a scientific poll. Respondents are self selecting. Questions are drawn from fortune cookies, hieroglyphics and tomorrow’s New York Times.

Please make your opinion known in this week's poll.

Free Frontier - An Alternative to NASA?

If you, like many Americans, are disappointed in, or outright appalled at, the apparent collapse of our space exploration program into the irrelevancy of junk science and self esteem social science, you might find some encouragement in this video.

H/T Sister Toldjah

White House Denies NASA Chief Muslim Outreach Claim

A prepostorous NASA/Muslim alliance heralded from Obama and now denied. Graphic via Saberpoint.

by the Left Coast Rebel

Who do you believe, NASA administrator Charles Bolden or Robert Gibbs/Obama? Fox News:

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday that NASA Administrator Charles Bolden must have misspoken when he told Al Jazeera last month that one of his top priorities is to reach out to Muslim countries.

"That was not his task and that's not the task of NASA," Gibbs said.

Bolden, though, said last month in the interview that it was President Obama who gave him that task. He made a similar claim in February.

The White House also backed up Bolden last week when his remarks first stirred controversy. A White House spokesman last Tuesday said Obama wants NASA to engage with the world's best scientists and that to meet that challenge, NASA must "partner with countries around the world like Russia and Japan, as well as collaboration with Israel and with many Muslim-majority countries."

Video of Gibbs denying NASA chief Charles Bolden's claim to Al Jazeera that one priority of NASA was to “find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering.”

Blatantly obvious, common sense exit question - if NASA chief Charles Boldon's Muslim claim is so absurd and being that he directly said that the Muslim outreach goal came straight from Obama himself, why does Charles Boldon still have a job?

Wouldn't he have been fired for such an absurd claim if it were not true?

Via Memeorandum, cross posted to Rational Nation, Proof Positive, LCR.

Ali Obama and the 535 Thieves

Hope and Change, Obama style!


Subtitle: Obama's new space program enters the seventh century!

Inspired by Michelle Malkin

Cross posted at Left Coast Rebel, Lady Cincinnatus

Krauthammer on Political Correctness at NASA

"This is a new height in fatuousness. NASA was established to get America into space and to keep is there. This idea to feel good about their past and to make achievements is the worst combination of group therapy, psychobabble, imperial condescension and adolescent diplomacy."

- Charles Krauthammer

NASA was established to get America into space and to keep is there. Could we get that bronzed and placed somewhere up on Capitol Hill? Under Obama, NASA is abandoning the United States preeminence in space in favor of global warming circle jerks and feel good political correctness. This guy has got to go!

More at News Busters
Cross posted at Proof Positive

Cross posted at Left Coast Rebel