Rep. Posey’s legislation, H.R 1641 would set the Moon as the next goal of U.S. human space exploration. As most at NASA will tell you, like anyone NASA works best when it has a goal. Here’s part of the text.
- “In accordance with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2005, which established as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s priority goal: `To develop a sustained human presence on the Moon . . . to promote exploration, commerce, science, and United States preeminence in space as a stepping stone for the future exploration of Mars and other destinations.’, and in accordance with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2008, which endorsed `the broad goals of the space exploration policy of the United States, including the eventual return to and exploration of the Moon and other destinations in the solar system and the important national imperative of independent access to space’, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shall plan to return to the Moon by 2022 and develop a sustained human presence on the Moon, in order to promote exploration, commerce, science, and United States preeminence in space as a stepping stone for the future exploration of Mars and other destinations. The budget requests and expenditures of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration shall be consistent with achieving this goal.
” [Emphasis added]
Not winning a whole lot of praise, I note. Perhaps one in ten comments at NASA Watch, Space Politics, and elsewhere come from people who like the idea. Otherwise people reject the idea as “space pork” or object to government run space programs or argue that there’s no point in getting back to the moon and trying to do anything there at all. And these are the reactions of people who profess to believe in the value of spaceflight, who go out of their way to find spaceflight-related web sites and comment on the various posts.
Such a lot of progress we’ve made in the last 50 years of astronautics! What wonders can we expect in the future given such enthusiastic support?
I wouldn’t sweat the opinions of commenters on the space blogs. If opinions of commenters of NasaWatch, SpacePolitics and several other space advocacy sites, and posts on the sites, were representative of the majority of Americans who pay any attention to space issues, the President would have won last year’s HSF space debate. Instead, he lost.
Recall that the majority of commenters on NasaWatch, et al. were very strongly in favor of the President’s FY11 space plan, very much opposed to the 2010 NASA Authorization bill and hated the SLS/MPCV. So, maybe you should cheer up…if history is any guide, opposition to Posey’s proposal by commenters on NasaWatch and SpacePolitics likely means his idea could become law by October 2011.