Oklahoma Democrats

Anyone who remembers my races for Congress  will know I always talked about the need to invigorate our space program, which I have called the “gifted/talented program” for government. Since the new Obama budget came out this week, many have asked me what I thought about the grounding of our Moon/Mars mission capabilities. Let me answer on three levels.

First, the good news is that the NASA budget actually goes up, with some needed R&D funds for better robots and life science. But that is offset by the fact we  in effect wasted 9 billion dollars  over the last six years building and designing new rockets and spaceships that we are not going to launch. This administrations new reliance on the private sector for that vital “getting people off the ground” aspect of space is shocking, considering their lack of faith in the private sector to do  right by our public in so many other ways!

Second, it is never good to stop your program at a time when rival nations are ramping up their programs. We are at risk of being dependent on the Chinese and Russians to get astronauts to the space station or other  earth orbit missions for possibly a decade.  Looks like we are trying hard to become the Portugal of space development.

Third, and perhaps the most amazing thing to me-this is bad politics coming from a team that sure knew how to win in 2008. Not only does this go against the grain of the space platform that was campaigned on in the last election, it shows no dramatic vision for the future-and a lot of people wanted to vote for Obama because they felt he had vision.  To those who say we can’t afford to do both the increase Obama has planned AND continue the work in place-how silly. We are talking about 10-20 billion dollars out of a budget in the trillions. We have shoved money by the bushel at a host of projects to protect jobs or create jobs.  Doing both does that too, preserves our aerospace technology lead, and gives us national pride and security.

Count me in with my fellow Democrat Senator Nelson from Florida. This is a mistake, and is what happens when bean counters with no vision are the policy wonks you put in charge of a budget.  Blue ribbon panels and commissions or committees never have grand visions. But thank Heaven JFK and LBJ  did. This is penny wise and pound foolish.

-Ben Odom

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