Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum, both aspiring Presidential nominee’s to be, and both critics of a US return to the Moon, and of fellow Conservative Newt Gingrich’s ideas for a base on the moon, are helping to consign the US and the Republican Party to second class loser status as a nation and a political party. Their outright rejection of the Moon, Near Earth Asteroids, Mars, anywhere in space as a place for true techno progressive US to be masters of, sentences the US and it’s citizens to mediocrity. By their statements, Romney and Santorum demonstrate their utter ignorance of anything accurate or factual concerning either space history or space energy and resources as a source of new wealth for the United States, it’s citizens, or anyone who still has the dream of a Spacefaring Nation without a peer as a role for the United States to take up, as a Fool’s errand.
Neither of them, in my opinion, are fit to be running for President, because of they ignore the Space Frontier, reject space as a place filled with energy and resources, and are completely ignorant of a future in space for Free Americans and Free People anywhere. No wonder so many misguided spacers are wedded to liberalism/socialism and the Democratic Party-at least the left embraces the promise of space development and settlement, even if they use space as a carrot on a stick to keep spacers working for a space future they too have no intention of making happen. Sad, so very very Sad !
I would think that after half a century of Spacefaring, that basic facts about the Moon, what it’s resources are, and what is needed to go there and demonstrate using raw lunar soil to make useful products would be common knowledge, known by everyone from schoolchildren to college students to Presidential Candidates and the Public at Large, but sadly, this is not the case. The utter failure of the mainstream media, NASA, the space community as a whole and the school system from Kindergarten thru graduate school to drill into our populace the facts that space is a place with resources ready to be used to make useful goods and products, and a place where new wealth will be created and new fortunes made, and history waiting to be reported on to the folks back home from their son’s and daughters busy proving how it’s done on the High Frontier, but sadly, this is not happening, and won’t be either, unless our people as a whole get a clue and get the facts about space.
Spacers who know what’s really happening with space policy and programs in the United States already know what Barack Obama has in store for NASA and the civil space program - in a word : NOTHING. Obama finished off the Space Shuttle program, and has not taken steps to insure a US crewed spacecraft is on the pad, ready to launch US Astronauts into orbit to the International Space Station, or anywhere else either. President Obama thus cements his legacy in my mind, as a Do-Nothing Democrat, a lying politician who is willing to do whatever he wants to insure his legacy, in his own mind and in the minds of his drone followers, as a “Great President”. Yeah, Right.
With the upcoming cuts in NASA’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget, NASA having to ask Russia for a ride to Mars for it’s part of the proposed Exo-Mars rover, and the continuing dependence on Russia to transport US Astronauts on Soyuz TMA spacecraft to and from the International Space Station, the US civil space program is again bearing the brunt of a political class that knows nothing factual or accurate about what space is for, what’s possible to do there, and how much it will cost to retain US leadership in space. Coupled with both major political parties utter lack of concern for anything space at all, lends credence to my idea that US and Earth nations have been divided into two different cultures a-la C.P. Snow - a vast majority of geocentric-static people’s and cultures, and an ineffective, increasingly hysterical circular firing squad of spacer’s who are shrinking in numbers and still have no clue about how to sell anything space to anyone in the public sphere here or abroad about space as a source of resources and energy. In the clash of cultures, geocentric-static, increasingly authoritarian bureaucratic versus space dynamist, future oriented space based cultures on the Moon, Mars, Near Earth Asteroids, the moon’s of the outer planets, and Kuiper Belt objects, the geocentric static authoritarians are winning, and the space community here and abroad, are largely LOSERS !
I recommend a massive demonstration via small spacecraft on the lunar surface the industrial processes needed to turn lunar soil into useful products like oxygen, silicon, titanium, Helium 3 and prove once and for all that mining and resource extraction are still major drivers of wealth creation, and useful on Earth, the Moon, Mars, or anywhere else either. The old in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU, still makes sense as both a concept and as a driver of productivity growth in space. Then when Astronauts return to the Moon to stay, they will have the knowledge of how to use raw lunar soil to make metals, ceramics, glasses, semiconductors, yield Helium 3, and get water to drink, oxygen to breathe, and fuel to top off the tanks of spacecraft heading to other places in space. Rather useful resources from a dead moon that is seen as “useless” by Romney or Santorum.
I am very disappointed in Rick Santorum, whom I was initially convinced would be the best person to get the Republican nomination for President, and the best person to take on Barack Obama, and win the hearts and minds of the American people with facts, figures, truth, passion, and spread the ideas that freedom must reign, liberty must take the day, capitalism not tied to cronyism or dictated by authoritarian masters was the best way to unfetter an economy and bring prosperity and wealth back to a nation riddled by debt, burdened by overregulation, infested with bureaucrats and illegal aliens, and reeling from the fall of the US dollar as a source of strength amongst the monies of the world. I still think Santorum, as a young gun of the Republican party is a good man, and maybe even the best man for the job, but his ignorance of anything accurate or factual about space policy and programs cripples him in my eyes, and renders him just another space-ignorant geocentric static bullshit politician, like all the rest, undistinguishable from the masses by any point of view not permanently fixed on Earth as it is now as the only place for human civilization to take hold, grow and thrive.
Anything else, is an unnecessary intrigue, and is a road we have been stuck in the ruts of for far too long, and this road leads nowhere we want to go as a nation, a people or a culture.
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