Plumbing the depths of Obama's space folly

Here's an excellent column by Charles Krauthammer in which he points out that in abandoning the Constellation spacecraft/booster system, President Obama has not only given Russia a monopoly in manned space flight (until the Chinese join them in dominating a field we once led, but now have abandoned), but- Administration rhetoric to the contrary- has effectively cut the ground out from under any attempt by NASA to put together a viable program to send humans to Mars in the future.

The job of taking over manned space flight, as Krauthammer points out,is simply beyond the capabilities of the private sector. But the public sector in Russia, China and India will undoubtedly do quite well in taking their nations far beyond us in space, thanks to the stunning short-sightedness of the current administration.

Fifty years ago, John F. Kennedy challenged us to go to the moon, "not because (it was) easy, but because (it was) hard." Barack Obama has now made going to Mars impossible. Where Kennedy dreamed and called us to meet the challenges of the future, Obama, in Krauthammer's cogent terms, has closed the New Frontier John Kennedy opened to us.

Tragically, he has done so at the very moment when employment and even the deficit might be effectively addressed by repeating the highly successful experience of the Apollo program not only in creating jobs (and whole new industries!), but of returning to the economy exponentially more than the government spent on it. And who knows how much additional tax revenue a crash program to go to Mars might have generated as a result? It is by no means impossible that such a program might in the long term positively, rather than negatively, impacted even the deficit.

But we'll never know, because Barack Obama has surrendered John Kennedy's dream.