My talk radio host in the morning (Barry Young on KFYI) explained what I was feeling, perfectly.
We're having a BIRTHRIGHT as Americans taken from us.
We're the nation that put men on the moon. We're the leaders in space. The Russians are such a distant second it's not even funny. "We are number 1. All others are number 2."
I
almost feel like my country is being completely and utterly destroyed, deliberately. By a thousand pricks, the biggest of which is in the White House and directing the rest of the pricks.
Obama is WAY too chummy with China. Look at all the campaign money that came from anonymous donors whose phone numbers trace to various Chinatowns across the US. Then there's the deliberate run-up of the national deficit. China is making mock protestations but I think they're actually happy with the situation: They'll destroy us with their banking hold over us and it will be cheaper than a war.
He's screwing up these terror trials deliberately, too. Holder's guarantees of a conviction WILL result in a mistrial and every single one of these bastards will be acquitted. To add insult to injury, we'll probably get sued and the bastards will get damages from us, then use that money to orchestrate new attacks.
Then there's health care.
Now the space program? The EU and Japan are the only sophisticated players in the game right now; Russia is like a space-trucker - unsophisticated but reliable. No goals, but they'll go from point A to point B if someone else pays for it. China and India are racing to catch up, and frankly I'm rooting for India to stay ahead of China. But it ain't gonna happen.
Taking my space program and turning it into a place to institutionalize AGW into a bureaucracy takes the current crowning achievement of our nation and of MANKIND and makes a mockery of it.
If NOTHING drives you to act to save the country... can't this?
NASA was created with a military and defensive purpose during the cold war, true... but in its heyday it embodied everything finest in man's exploratory nature.
If it is dismantled... the talent of the entire space/aerospace industry will disperse. All that generational knowledge, institutional teamwork, the art of spacecraft design, the courage to step into a craft, the trust and faith between ground support and astronaut staff... it will evaporate and disappear. The technological cost alone will be terrible. The psychological blow...worse.
And: if the laws of statistics don't protect us and something comes hurtling towards us in the next decade? With a mothballed shuttle system and its support structure completely dismantled, no Ares/Constellation, and the aerospace infrastructure LEGACY that is our birthright destroyed: we'll be doomed. Such a challenge is currently outside of the scope of NASA... even 1970's NASA (which was greater than today's agency). With no NASA at all, we'd be so far behind the curve as to be without hope.