Campaign '04

Kerry to visit KSC

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is scheduled to appear at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday. The stop is part of Kerry’s “Freedom Trail to Boston”, a series of campaign stops leading up to his arrival this week at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. The stops are in “cities and towns that symbolize America’s spirit and values”, according to a campaign press release, ranging from Aurora, Colorado (where Kerry was born) to Norfolk, Virginia, and Philadelphia. At KSC Kerry is expected to “discuss how lessons gleaned from science and innovative advances made by the space program can be applied toward making America stronger,” according to the AP. It’s unclear whether he will discuss space policy, but the newspaper Florida Today hopes so in an editorial in Sunday’s edition:

Tell us — and tell America — your vision for our nation’s quest in space.

And tell us in detail, not warm-and-fuzzy campaign speak that makes for good sound bites but says little and means even less.

You haven’t done that in your campaign for the White House, but you need to.

11 comments to Kerry to visit KSC

  • Harold LaValley

    Was watching the Red Sox game and what do I spy but Kerry and John Glenn seated near the dug out with a soldier seated in between them. Such chums all of a sudden. I wonder if Glenn has coached him with what to say tommorrow.

  • Anonymous

    Bipartisan support of the Vision for Space Exploration would be good.

  • Perry A. Noriega

    Bipartisan support for VSE would be beyond good, it would be great, but I want to hear whether Kerry wants to laud “lessons gleaned from science and innovative advances made by the space program which can be applied toward making America stronger” via NASA’s management and past achievements, or whether he sees a future in space beyond the Shuttle, ISS, and beyond Earth orbit. I suspect he will not commit to anything but empty rhetoric, and nebulous words that could mean anything, and will in fact, mean nothing.

    I’ve been waiting for a Democrat running for President to commit to a long range vision for space for thirty some years now, and I’m frankly tired of waiting. I want action, and all Democrats have given are cut, slash, and chop, where NASA’s budgets are concerned.Not to imply Republicans are any better as a whole, outside of gadflies and renegades like Jack Schmitt, Dana Rohrabacher, and Tom DeLay, to name but a very few.

    In my opinion, both Political Parties, and the space advocate community are still light years apart in seeing a future in space for the US, much less for the common man and woman. And no Political party or major politician really cares about space goals beyond shuttle ISS, much less space settlement for and by the masses. And the space advocate community has yet to vastly expand its members, and create demand in the common folk for space anything. But I would welcome being proved wrong.

  • Anonymous

    If he has good advisors, he’ll mention the Apollo 11 anniversary and President Kennedy.

  • Mark Zinthefer

    Given his previous comments on space exploration, I don’t have much hope for this.

    http://www.space.com/news/kerry_report_040616.html

    I was pretty upset after reading about how NASA’s focus should be on orbital drug research. combined with his praise of Clinton space policies, veiled hints at NASA budget cuts, and essential dismissal of manned Mars exploration, I am under the impression that Kerry is an enemy to the future of manned space exploration and settlement.

  • In other words, he did the same thing that the platform does–used space as a prop to talk about his non-space agenda.

  • Anonymous

    I think that both candidates have decided that publicly speaking about space exploration is not a good move. It cannot help them, and can possibly hurt them.

    HOWEVER… that is not necessarily a bad thing. Just because the candidates do not make this an issue does not hurt things. In fact, we can consider it a good thing because it will not get tossed around in the partisan arena.

    In the case of Bush, we have no public statements other than the one in January, but we do have a threat to veto massive cuts to the NASA budget. That’s positive.

    Kerry is a little less to be excited about. But at the very least he has not announced that he is going to gut NASA and give the money to health care.

  • No, but he’s said that he’s going to go back to the Clinton policy, in which budgets are cut every year and it’s used to promote international agendas having little to do with space.

  • To Kerry, science is a word that means nothing more than AIDS and stem cell research. As far as I can tell, in the shadow of the huge space infrastructure of the Cape, Kerry said nothing substantial about space.

    I think President Bush is a dolt, but I do believe he would be more receptive to a space economic plan than Kerry (which wasn’t presented to the president anyway). Kerry sees space exploration and exploitation as an elitist waste of money, I’m sure of it.

    But, since there are bigger fish to fry, I will vote for Kerry.