The Clear Lake (TX) Citizen has a couple of articles this week about politics and space. One article discusses the visit last month of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to the Univ. of Houston. DeLay apparently has high hopes for the NASA budget which don’t (as of yet) appear to be justified by events:
“We’re going to start with $17-18 billion and that’s just the beginning,” he said. “It will be an educational process and we’ll let the Congress decide.”
DeLay also went on to call phasing out the shuttle and completing the ISS as issues that are “minor in scope.” A separate article discussed another reception for Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), nominally a Republican but in reality more of a libertarian. Paul stated that events in Iraq have drained money away that could have been spent on NASA:
“If you had a space program in Baghdad, you could probably get money for it but Congress is cutting our space program budget…”
Paul, as some may remember, was the only member of the House to vote against HR3752 earlier this year.
Minor nit:
Rep. Ron Paul (D-TX), should be (R-TX) correct?
Yes, Ron Paul should be (R-TX); I’ve corrected the original post.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/198/1
“In another case, Congressman Bart Gordon is misidentified as a Republican.”
This is typical of a Libertarian having no truck for anything truly Progressive like space development and favoring as little or no government as possible as his most valued criteria. This is why Libertarianism has devolved into an idealistic, loser political party with only a hardcorps of devotees living in a fantasy world of life as it was in the late 18th Century to before the Civil War era.
I used to be a Libertarian, but gave up on it when I became aware that they would do even more than the status quo to gut space budgets and devalue space anything in the grand scheme of things overall. In fact, no political party as a whole in the US or around the world cares a whit for anything space, despite VSE and President’ Bush’s non statements regarding it since January.
Obviously the answer to how to get to space via the political process lies elsewhere besides conventional means.
Correction: the above should have read that the Libertarians will do even less than the status quo in space budgets, etc. The libertarians appear to talk the talk, but their geocentric-archaic policies and politics would lead to even less than the less than half a loaf the civil space program has at present, and the Libertarian blind faith expectation of funding and support for civil and commercial space programs is a fantasy, like their hopes for more than less government and election to more than a few local or state offices in this age of democratic distemper and demand for more and more from government and less and less money available from an overtaxed-undertaxed populace, dependind on whose geocentric political economic ideology you believe in.