"Let us now embark upon this great journey into the stars to find whatever may await us."
-John McCain
John McCain is a strong supporter of NASA and the space program. He is proud to have sponsored legislation authorizing funding consistent with the President's vision for the space program, which includes a return of astronauts to the Moon in preparation for a manned mission to Mars. He believes support for a continued US presence in space is of major importance to America's future innovation and security. He has also been a staunch advocate for ensuring that NASA funding is accompanied by proper management and oversight to ensure that the taxpayers receive the maximum return on their investment. John McCain believes curiosity and a drive to explore have always been quintessential American traits. This has been most evident in the space program, for which he will continue his strong support.
For Obama on Flame Trench blog here:
After months of varying policy statements on the issue of space exploration, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama gave what sounded like a more firm commitment to NASA's plans to build the Orion spacecraft to replace the space shuttle.
In a town-hall style meeting and rally in Kissimmee last night, the Democrats' likely nominee fielded questions from a crowd that included some folks from Brevard County with an interest in the space program.
Here's a little of what he said:
"I want us to understand what it is we want to accomplish, so we can continue to build this program. Other countries are in position to leapfrog us if we don't continue to make this investment."
However, Obama wants to delay Orion for five years to fund Education.
And lastly from Hillary's campaign here from The Space Review:
“increase support for basic and applied research by increasing the research budgets at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the Department of Defense.” Notice the absence of NASA.
Meanwhile, she did say that she would “make the financial investments in research and development necessary to shore up and expand our competitive edge.” That implies that she would, at the very least, restore NASA’s aeronautics budget to its pre-2004 level. That means finding an extra half billion dollars. Without making any commitment to an overall increase in the agency’s budget, it’s hard to see how this could be done without cutting into the budgets for science and exploration.
Basically Hillary's will be a better one than her husbands. But no support for returning to the Moon.
And what she will do to NASA for Climate Change here from her campaign site:
Develop a comprehensive space-based Earth Sciences agenda. A National Academy of Sciences report found that “[a]t a time of unprecedented need, the nation’s Earth observation satellite programs, once the envy of the world, are in disarray.” (NAS final report of the Decadal Survey Panel, [January 2007].) Incredibly, the number of operating sensors and instruments on NASA satellites that observe the Earth is likely to drop by 35 percent by 2010 and 50 percent by 2015. Among other things, NASA’s Earth Sciences program is vital to our country’s – and the world’s – long-term efforts to confront climate change. Hillary will fully fund NASA’s Earth Sciences program and initiate a Space-based Climate Change Initiative to help us secure the scientific knowledge we need to combat global warming and to prepare for extreme climate events.
From The Space Review article on Climate Change:
In her speech she promised that if elected she will “launch a new, comprehensive space-based study of climate change.” Bravo! The problem is, who will design the parameters of this study? Who will choose which data sets to acquire and how to correlate them with previous studies? If the answer is Al Gore, James Hansen, and other partisans of the anthropomorphic global warming theory, then the study will be regarded by skeptics as hopelessly compromised. If the same kind of study was designed by Fred Singer and Bjorn Lomborg, Clinton would be among the first to raise questions about its validity.
My bet is no exploration or posts on the Moon or Mars and most of the budget within Earth Orbit.
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