Well, he still doesn’t have one, but there’s nothing particularly objectionable about these comments, as far as they go:
Q: What do you plan to do with the space agency? Like right now they’re currently underfunded, they, at first they didn’t know if they were going to be able to operate Spirit rover. What do plan to do with it?
Obama: I think that, I, uh. I grew up with the space program. Most of you young people here were born during the shuttle era. I was the Apollo era. I remember, you know, watching, you know, the moon landing. I was living in Hawaii when I was growing up, so the astronauts would actually, you know, land in the Pacific and then get brought into Honolulu and it was incredible memories and incredibly inspiring. And by the way inspired a whole generation of people to get engaged in math and science in a way that we haven’t – that we need to renew. So I’m a big supporter of the space program. I think it needs to be redefined, though.
We’ve kind of lost a sense of mission in terms of what it is that NASA should be trying to achieve and I think that we’ve gotta make some big decisions about whether or not, are we going to try to send manned, you know, space launches, or are we better off in terms of what we’re learning sending unmanned probes which oftentimes are cheaper and less dangerous, but yield more information.
And that’s a major debate I’m going to want to convene when I’m president of the United States. What direction do we take the space program in? Once we have a sense of what’s going to be most valuable for us in terms of gaining knowledge, then I think we’ll able to adjust the budget so that we’re going all out on what it is that we’ve decided to do.”
I’ve long said that we need to have a national debate on what we want to do in space, and why–something that hasn’t really happened since NASA was chartered, half a century ago, so I would certainly welcome such a debate in the unfortunate event of an Obama presidency.
My question is, though: why wait? Why not have the debate now, so we can decide who we want to vote for, at least for those of us for whom space is a voting issue (if not the only consideration). What would be the venue and framework for the debate? What does Senator Obama think that the potential options are? Will he be constrained by past thinking, of space as the province of NASA and astronauts, with billions of dollars flowing in its porcine manner to Houston, Huntsville and the Cape, or will he be open to both goals and means that are more innovative than we’ve seen from any previous administration, including the Bush administration? Will he be a candidate for “hope” and “change” for the high frontier?
Well, like all his other positions, he does offer “hope” and “change” for space with the above words, but not clue one as to what we should be hoping for, and what form the “change” will take. In other words, as on other issues, he continues to deal in platitudes, and is unwilling to take a stand, or even discuss potential options, for fear of alienating the voters, who he hopes will continue to view him as a political Rorschach test, and see in his space policy, as in all his policies, what they want to see.
So while I hope that if elected, we will have that national dialogue about space, I don’t have any high expectations either that it will actually happen, or that anything useful will come out of it, because he offers me no substance now.
Of course, even if he told me that he’s going to do all of the things that I’d like to see from a space policy standpoint, it wouldn’t be sufficient to get me to vote for him because a) I couldn’t be sure that he meant it, given his flip flopping on other issues, 2) his positions on other issues are too odious to allow me to be a single-issue voter on space and 3) even if sincere, there’s no reason, given his complete lack of executive experience, that he will have any success whatsoever in implementing them.
Still, I’d sure like to see that national debate.