Obama Pits Human Space Exploration Against Education [View All]

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/11/obama-pits-huma.html

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama released a new $18 billion education plan yesterday that he proposes to pay for by delaying the NASA Constellation program (to return humans to the moon) five years.

"We're not going to have the engineers and the scientists to continue space exploration if we don't have kids who are able to read, write and compute," Obama said.

Space Exploration is becoming more of an issue in the 2008 presidential election. Hillary Clinton released her civil space policy on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik last month, promising to speed development of next generation crew exploration vehicles. Her release says:

Hillary is committed to a space exploration program that involves robust human spaceflight to complete the Space Station and later human missions, expanded robotic spaceflight probes of our solar system leading to future human exploration, and enhanced space science activities. She will speed development, testing, and deployment of next-generation launch and crew exploration vehicles to replace the aging Space Shuttle.

Obama's proposal to slip NASA's Constellation program to pay for education puts education and space in direct competition for tax dollars. Space Exploration historically has not competed with education for federal dollars because most educational programs are funded at the state level. The Department of Education and NASA are also traditionally in separate funding bills going through Congress and thus are not competing for the funds within a given appropriation bill.

Given that that Space Shuttle is retiring in 2010 and there is already a four year gap before the Ares I vehicle will be ready to launch crews to Space Station, a five year delay of the Constellation program would leave the United States government without its own human launch capability for nearly ten years.

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