well, without being too political, take a careful look at the proposals of the administration:(emphases mine)
Among the administration's review of the space program:
• Setting a target for retiring the shuttle fleet
• A plan to phase out the International Space Station
• Picking a new space vehicle for manned flights
• Debating the costs and benefits of a permanent moon base
• Developing a proposal for a mission to Mars.
looks to me what they're really doing is cutting the whole thing back. none of those "proposals" actually entails building anything...
it's all Bushspeak
it's all Bushspeak
You sure about that eta? It almost smacks of planning before acting!
Nope Eta Vero is speaking verily. The Bush administration don't understand space, especially seeing as Dubya hasn't been there and can't even conceive of such a place. Like the rest of the universe. It don' look like Texas, none.
Ergo, rather than upset his conservative supporters by openly canning the space programme, he's effectively put it on hold by "parking" the major programmes and talking about scaling back or canning the current main thrusts.
"Nasa," he is saying, "UP YOURS!" And this will be especially poignant if the US loses what few shreds of collective sanity it still possesses and re-elects the plonker!
The problem for me, as a space nutter, is that I tend to agree with the administration's apparent assessment of Nasa as a bunch of time-servers and captives of the manufacturers. But I don't want to see the space programme canned, or even cut back.
Back in the late '60s or early '70s Analog Science Fact/Fiction ran a little point by point comparison of the Space Age and the Age of Discovery. They stopped short of noting that at the beginning of the Age of Discovery the superpowers were Spain and Portugal and at the end they were England and France.
eatoin has a point
Sounds like the same old Bushwa to me!