What would they want?

One of the candidates for the nation’s highest office offers an imaginative space initiative and the other candidates poke fun at it. I don’t know which is worse: offering a goal with no resources or belittling the idea of having goals at all. Personally I am disgusted with the whole process – and the polls tell me that I am far from alone. I wonder what Gus and Dick and Rick would have thought of that, too.

It is clearly presumptuous on my part to imagine what those heroes who made the supreme sacrifice would want. But they were all on record, before they died, giving voice to what they wanted. That record is one we can listen to, read, study, and evaluate.

Without exception, they were going into space because they thought it was worth the cost, worth the risk. They saw the future out there.

As I said, Romney could have criticized Newt’s plans without sounding like such an empty man.

It’s not that loony.

He sure made it a lot harder to have a serious discussion about it. And for some reason, most reporters just find it impossible to describe history accurately:

President George W. Bush planned a return to the moon, but didn’t give the program the resources advocates hoped for. President Obama scrapped Bush’s plan in favor of promoting a private sector future farther out in space, but also cut back dramatically in the face of a budget crisis.

Sigh. The administration proposed a budget increase for NASA. But instead Congress, on a bipartisan basis, added in an unneeded rocket development while cutting funds for anything useful. Because it’s all about jobs, not doing anything in space.

I have some more questions for him over at PJMedia.