Tuesday, January 29, 2008

State of the Union, Politics, and Outer Space

Last night I watched the whole State of the Union Address by George "Dubyah" and didn't hear a single word about space. I guess that reflects how much his administration cared about the space program. Though I suppose he had other things on his mind these last seven years. He talked mainly about his strong points and didn't really introduce anything new or radical. Really the only thing new at all that he spoke about was the stimulus plan and possibly more funding for education vouchers.

But onto to more interesting topics. This coming Wednesday, the 31st, the CNN/Politico.com debate is being held between the remaining Democratic presidential candidates. An amazing 20 of the 25 top user submitted questions were involving space policy. For the Republican debate it was a good solid 11 of the 25 top spots. Unfortunately these questions aren't for sure going to be asked, though if any of them do you can give the credit to John Benac, a 2007 college graduate and new father who works as a manufacturing engineer for Boeing on the 737 program, who has successfully harnessed the power of the Internet to put space on the radar of the organizers of the upcoming event. Benac pretty much has been interested in space since he was young and thought that he could try to push it to the political forefront with the help of the Internet. He asked users of astronomy sites to vote for their favorite questions and the result was that the No. 1 most popular question for the Democratic candidates was: "Will you continue to support the NASA Vision for Space Exploration with its goals of exploring the Moon, Mars, and beyond? Do you see a connection between exploration and education?" Though some of the space related questions have slipped in rankings to subjects such as the Iraq war, Katrina, and Social Security, there are still very many space related questions in both the Dem. and Repub. debates.

We can just hope that all of the support for space will translate into actual political action and maintained support. Well as you know, only time will tell.

Image credit: http://www.barrycrimmins.com/images/news/news-demd.jpg

The Fool

4 comments:

Bob Johnson said...

Lol,dubyah, love it, I 'm not that fimilar with American politics, how do you think the Democratic party will view the space program will they stick to Bushes long term plans of space, Moon then Mars? I love the little icons on the bottom of each post, how did you do it?

The Fool said...

Well I would say that overall the Democrats will probably stick to the same plan. Though want to add funding to NASA and some want to cut on manned missions and stick to robotic missions. We will find out a lot more after this weeks debates. So I' not too sure yet. For the buttons I had to edit some code and I got the link from http://beautifulbeta.blogspot.com/2006/09/social-bookmarking-revisited.html It took me a while to get the code just right but it works now.

The Fool

Anonymous said...

You know what conservative politicians are all about... privatisation! NASA will probably be sold off to SpaceX and Rocketplane Kistler in no time... not that Elon Musk needs any more money with his personal wealth of $320 million =P

The Fool said...

Ha, I would put Virgin Galactic as being the one that buys NASA, though I wouldn't bet on it. With Bigelowe having a good sum of ca$h available.

The Fool