On Friday Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) appeared on a talk show on a Cleveland PBS station to discuss a variety of issues, including potential job cuts or even the closure of the NASA Glenn Research Center. (The official site of the show doesn’t have a transcript, but one is available here, oddly enough, at a site that appears to cater to European leftists; scroll towards the bottom for the section on Glenn.) During the interview Kucinich made an interesting comment:
Well, the administration has decided that it’s more important to go to the Moon and Mars and forget civil aviation in the United States, forgetting of course that the reason why we have a space program is because it came through the evolution of flight with civil aviation.
I think you can make a strong argument that the space program’s ties with civil aviation are pretty weak, at best: rocketry has been a very distinct field from aviation, and didn’t evolve from it.
In a related story, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported Tuesday that a bipartisan coalition of Ohio politicians, which includes Kucinich, said they are willing to play what Rep. Steven LaTourette (R-OH) called the “Ohio card”: reminding President Bush that he is still president “because he won Ohio,” according to the article, in order to stave off cuts at Glenn.
To me NASA is about sending humans to space. Private companies have done a better job in aviation than NASA. Also NASA is not a make work program..
I’m sure President Bush will remember that Ohio connection the next time he runs for president.
Lame duckishness cuts both ways.
I know what you mean. NASA should go in one direction.
I agree that NASA should focus on space. There are aviation components to spaceflight which are unique to NASA however I think the personal sky car isn’t one of them. I think these technologies could go the way of the TransHab and turn them over to a private company. However NASA might be better at developing air traffic control system but maybe a private company would be good too.
Key advances required for personal air vehicles are intelligent automation and improved human-machine interface technologies. Both of these are highly relevent to space exploration but working with them in an aeronautics context allows the work to proceed much cheaper and faster than if initial, hardware trials were oriented toward space. This greater accesibility allows more participation from universities and private companies that may ultimately commercialize it and then be in a position to cost effectively support space activities as well as civil and DoD flight applications.
Ken