Rep. Mike Coffman Chimes in… A Strategic Retreat From Leadership

A post by Colorado Representative Mike Coffman at The Huffington Post applauds the bipartisan support that has arisen in the fight for NASA and the Constellation Program.  The article likens the proposal to the “Faster, Better, Cheaper” mantra of past NASA administrations with a reminder that the “myopic focus on cost-cutting at the expense of prudent engineering led to a series of disastrously failed NASA missions during the 1990s”.  Representative Coffman labels the budget proposal as “reckless and  naïve” and calls upon the administration to reverse the proposal to cancel Constellation and instead to leverage it as a springboard to “inject new energy and chart new destinations” for our nation’s human space exploration.

Seeking to put his stamp on America’s storied adventures in rocketry and robotics, the president could have gone boldly in new directions, using past achievements as a springboard to new destinations. But his proposed budget for space exploration describes an approach that is both reckless and naïve.

Commercial space leader and X Prize winner Burt Rutan summed it up well in a recent letter to Congress, “Two years after Neil and Buzz landed on the moon, America led the world in awarding PhDs in science, engineering, and math. Today we are not even on the first or second page… The motivation of our youth is the most important thing we can do for our nation’s long-term security and prosperity.”

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