Reshared post from +George Wiman
"But more importantly, supporting a robust space program raises everyone's expectations of what is possible."
The $1.5bn annual that Nye is recommending is just over two days' worth of what we were spending in Iraq at the height of that war. Planetary science gives back to our economy like a giant money machine, and raises our brand around the world.
Bill Nye’s Open Letter to President Obama
You may know Bill Nye as the Science Guy, but he’s also a passionate supporter of scientific research and CEO of The Planetary Society, a phenomenal group that advocates for planetary exploration. For the past couple of years, NASA’s budget for planetary mission has been on a bizzare roller coaster…
However, if you look at what is arguably the greatest space accomplishment by the United States, the reason that it was successful was because it was (in a way) a weapons system.
The "space race" of the 1950s and 1960s, despite the fact that no weapons were involved, was clearly a battlefront in the Cold War. I haven't located the original quote, but Tom Wolfe quoted one of the politicians (Lyndon Johnson, I think) as referring to the threat of a "Communist moon." And when you had Yugi Gagarin orbiting the Earth and the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961, Kennedy's May pledge to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade makes it clear that Kennedy was thinking about beating the Russians, and not about getting Tang to the masses.
http://history.nasa.gov/moondec.html
If there hadn't been a Cold War, would we have devoted resources to "showing we're the best" via NASA? Definitely not.
In this post-Cold War era, is it possible to get a national consensus to make NASA a strategic priority? I believe the answer is "yes," for one simple reason: recently, Sheikh Ali al Hemki issued a fatwa prohibiting Muslims from traveling to Mars.
http://www.examiner.com/article/fatwa-forbids-muslims-from-traveling-to-mars
If you tell the people that NASA funding will anger the so-called "jihadists," NASA will be awash in money.
Actually, the reason why the Sheikh issued the fatwa was because of what would happen to the people who would be sent on the Mars One mission. "These experiments will lead to the destruction of those who try, and so should be done with animals, not people."
Now he's going to get PETA mad at him…
+John E. Bredehoft Yeah, there was definitely a defense aspect to it, but also (not unrelated,b but not the same) a nationalistic aspect to the Race to the Moon — a conscious effort to demonstrate how the US (and, by extension, the West and our way or doing things) was better than the Soviets. Different arguments for different audiences.
I think, as time went on, the defense aspects faded from both urgency and publicity. The public inspiration hearts-and-minds aspect remained, defeated largely by a decade of turmoil, protest, and Viet Nam. But that optimistic and positive attitude still remains, I think to tap into.