We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
–John F. Kennedy, 1962
The usually reticent Neil Armstrong went after Obama today on his lack of a “vision thing” for space travel in a letter signed by two other astronauts, James Lovell and Eugene Cernan.
Armstrong warns that scrapping manned missions to the moon and Mars and hitching rides with the Russians — for money — is not the hottest idea. “Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity,” Lovell, Armstrong, and Cernan said in the letter.
John F. Kennedy — a president who also gave the country one of its largest tax cuts — was not the sort of man who would have let us take a back seat to the rest of the world in the Space Race. But, even though he’ll spend close to a trillion dollars on his beloved and vaporific “Stimulus Package”, Barack Obama will not shell out the few billion needed to keep America in the manned space game for the next few years as we transition out of the Shuttle phase and into the early years of the Orion project.
Manned space travel is one of thew few things that makes people step back from their petty little lives, transcend themselves, and see life on a whole new level.
Barack Obama does not understand this. The “community organizer” is far more interested in continuing to sell his malignant health care “reform” package. Space travel is the triumph of the individual over great odds. Obama doesn’t have that kind of vision, never did, and never will.
Neil Armstrong and John F. Kennedy were right, and Barack Obama is wrong.