No Space Telescope Left Behind
While link-hunting for Yet Another Space Post (which is refusing to really come together in the way I'd like, so it'll be another day or so), I ran across a post where Rand Simberg calls me stupid. Well, OK, he actually calls Kevin Drum dumb, but I'm lumped in with other Bush-bashers. Simberg writes:
The sense one gets from much of the commentary is that they'd favor the proposal if it were coming from a President Gore, or President Dean, but if Bush is proposing it, there's obviously something evil and cynical about it.
[...] It would be nice if the policy could be discussed on its merits or lack thereof, but I suspect that that's a forlorn hope in a Red/Blue America.
That's at least half true-- I know that Gore's a geek, so if he announced a new space program, I'd figure he meant it. Dean, I don't know well enough to say.
But it's not really political partisanship that makes me leery of Bush's plan (though I do loathe the man and his administration). It's a sense of pattern recognition-- we've seen this before, after all. We've had funds promised for the rebuilding of New York City, that somehow failed to materialize. We had promises that the rebuilding of Afghanistan would be done right this time, followed by a budget submitted to Congress with no money for Afghanistan. We've watched them make promises to Pakistan, and then sell them out. We've seen more money promised for fighting AIDS in Africa, and then found that it was just a re-allocation of existing money. Again and again, we get proposals that sound great in ten-second sound bites, that turn out to be far less than they seem-- they end up as window dressing, or unfunded mandates, or just shady ways of killing off other programs.
And now, we get nice talk about space, followed by this:
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration decreed an early death yesterday to one of its flagship missions and most celebrated successes, the Hubble Space Telescope.
In a midday meeting at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., two days after President Bush ordered NASA to redirect its resources toward human exploration of the Moon and Mars, the agency's administrator, Sean O'Keefe, told the managers of the space telescope that there would be no more shuttle visits to maintain it.
The stated reason is that safety upgrades to the Shuttle can't be completed in time to complete the next scheduled maintenance flight, and rescheduling it would cut into the construction schedule for the International Space Station. Never mind that, in terms of getting useful science done, they'd be better off crashing the ISS into the ocean, and doing nothing but Hubble maintenance missions for the next several years...
So, yeah, I doubt the sincerity of the Bush plan. And I think I've got statistics on my side.
Posted at 10:53 PM | link | follow-ups |